U of T Magazine | Winter 2018

Make No Mistake Keeping patients safe / Ending an Addiction Getting “no” to stick / Student in Crisis A faculty rallies A Bullet’s Toll Surviving gunfire / Rabbi Rena Guiding us through grief / Comfort Food Edna Staebler’s kitchen legacy

Winter 2018

PLAN B THE POWER OF REINVENTION

Winter 2018 Volume 45, No. 2

p. 62 Why we make bad decisions when presented with too much choice

28 Plan B

30 With a Student in Crisis, a Faculty Rallies

Scrapping everything and taking a fresh approach can be exhilarating. But what happens when change is not a choice?

BY STACEY GIBSON

COVER: REMIE GEOFFROI; ABOVE: VICKY LAM

In an instant, Emma’s hopes of becoming a nurse were dashed. Could she make the journey back?

65 Fanny & Keats The winning entry in our short story contest explores a question almost every couple asks: Will it last?

BY CHRIS GILMORE

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Departments Winter 2018 Volume 45 No. 2 Editor and Manager Scott Anderson Deputy Editor Stacey Gibson Art Direction and Design The Office of Gilbert Li Editorial and Advertising Assistant Sally Choi Co-Publishers Barbara Dick, Assistant Vice-President, Alumni Relations

I now really understand the gravity of injury and illness. I now deeply understand a patient’s confusion and fear

– Emma Taylor (a pseudonym), a nursing student who, while pursuing her degree, spent time as a patient in hospital and in home care. She graduated this past November. p. 30

Paul Fraumeni, Executive Director, Digital Creative Services Vice-President, U of T Communications David Estok Editorial and Advertising Inquiries (416) 978-0838 uoft.magazine@utoronto.ca All correspondence and undeliverable copies: U of T Magazine, 21 King’s College Circle, Toronto, ON m5s 3j3 U of T Magazine, with a circulation of 330,000, is published three times a year online and twice a year in print by U of T Communications.

All material is copyright © 2018 Governing Council, University of Toronto, and may be reprinted with permission. Alumni receive the magazine free of charge. Donations accepted at magazine.utoronto.ca under “Support Us,” or send a cheque payable to the University of Toronto at the above address.

13 Student Deanna Lentini is on a mission to help end homelessness in Toronto

21 A U of T startup has created an app to help the precariously employed manage their money

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85 Behold the dragon bus! Kevin Bracken (BA 2009 UC) and friends built the custom vehicle with a fire-breathing jaw and a small stage to unleash “massive participatory art that anyone can enjoy.”

3 Letters Science and Religion 7 President’s Message Expecting the Unexpected

8 Calendar Figures of Sleep 11 Life on Campus Our Partners in Africa

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19 Leading Edge The Big Bang 65 Writing Contest Winners 71 Thank You to Our Donors 81 All About Alumni The City Is Her Patient 88 Time Capsule Bringing Up Baby

Letters Regarding “How Did the Universe Begin?”: Thanks for practicing tolerance and having the courage to publish something that’s likely going to offend a few people, but deserves to be heard nonetheless.

GAVIN SINGH

BASc 2006, VAUGHAN, ONTARIO

Please Stay in Canada, Dr. Almilaji Your inspiring article about Khaled Almilaji (“For This Syrian Grad Student, a Fresh Start,” Autumn 2017) made me proud to be a U of T alum. I understand why Dr. Almilaji and his wife would feel the need to return to Syria to continue their important work, but I hope they consider staying in Canada as new citizens. Please update us on this couple in future issues.

MARY MCLAREN

BA 1979 TRINITY, MIDHURST, ONTARIO

The article about Dr. Almilaji and his journey to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at U of T connected with me in a personal way. Years ago, I received my PhD from Brown University, and for more than two decades I held an appointment in public health at U of T’s Faculty of Medicine. At that time, my principal professional contributions were in women’s reproductive health in what was then called the Third World. Those efforts included programs with the same components that have engaged Dr. Almilaji in the

Middle East. I am particularly cheered by the recognition of the importance of this work.

RICHARD OSBORN

PROFESSOR EMERITUS, NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO

Cold Dry Summer I enjoyed your article about the origins of U of T Mississauga (“It was 50 Years Ago Today,” Autumn 2017). I enrolled as a science student at Erindale College when it opened in 1967. At the end of my first year, I was asked by Principal Tuzo Wilson to take part in a research project in the high Arctic. I was on Devon Island for 11 weeks that summer with a researcher from Ohio State University, surveying the ice cap movements. We ate freeze-dried U.S. military food for the entire time, and there were no showers. It was a very interesting summer.

WILL DRAPER

DDS 1972, DARTMOUTH, NOVA SCOTIA

U of T Should Promote Cycling It’s good to see that U of T is investigating the sources of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions (“How Much Methane,” Autumn 2017). I suspect one of the largest will be automobiles. So the question arises: How do we help residents leave the car at home?

Making cycling safer is a crucial first step. The university should urge the mayor to expand Toronto’s bike lane network – not only on campus but across the city. The Bloor Street bike lane, which runs along the university’s northern flank, is especially important as it’s the network’s east-west backbone.

The Bloor lane needs to be extended right out to the border with Mississauga.

U of T should be a strong proponent of this at City Hall.

Freedom of Worship

GIDEON FORMAN

MICHAEL HAYKIN

BA 1987 VICTORIA, TORONTO

As a historian, I was deeply interested in and appreciative of Prof. Peter Russell’s broad-stroke overview of our Canadian heritage (“What Canada Got Right,” Autumn 2017). In one of his answers, he states that the 1774 Quebec Act was the first legal guarantee of freedom of worship in the world and that even Great Britain did not have such. The English Toleration Act of 1689, however, did guarantee freedom of worship for Protestants outside of the state church, though not for Roman Catholics. The Quebec Act was an advance on this in that it included Catholics – a small, though not unimportant detail, not clearly indicated by Prof. Russell’s answer.

BA 1974 VICTORIA, ThD 1982, DUNDAS, ONTARIO

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Feedback

“How Did the Universe Begin,” the comic-style article by U of T professor and astronomer Barth Netterfield about his belief in God, attracted a deluge of comments. So we asked illustrator Jonathan Dyck to draw a few of the readers who sent them.

What readers tweeted about our Autumn 2017 issue Andrew Pyper’s personal column about abandoning a career in law to become a novelist struck a chord: Thank you for this. Have been in this world of law for 16+ years and time and again I think, “What if?”

Anita @anita_aav1

Wow! How lucky for us that you walked away from a life as a lawyer!!!!

Dianne Laheurte @DiLaheurte

A thank you from one of the people featured in our last issue: Cool to be part of a “dynamic duo” with @a_pytlak.

Thanks @UofT for educating & graduating us rebels.

Ray Acheson @achesonray

A Q&A with President Meric Gertler drew kudos: Congrats Pres. Gertler 5+ yrs @UofT. “We can’t tell the difference between a domestic student and an international student at U of T” #LoveTO G. Penalosa @Penalosa_G

Top stories from Autumn 2017 By views

How a Verbal Test Can Reveal Your Brain Health U of T startup WinterLight Labs analyzes speech for evidence of dementia.

By Facebook likes

A Legacy of Mentorship In the wake of the tragic death of lawyer Geoff Taber and his family in a cottage fire, U of T’s Faculty of Law and Rotman

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School of Management have set up the Geoff Taber Memorial Scholarship. Rotman has also established the Geoff Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

By comments

How Did the Universe Begin?

The graphic treatment of how astronomer Barth Netterfield balances his professional work as a scientist with his religious beliefs drew mostly praise from readers.

And praise for U of T’s decision to accept Syrian doctor Khaled Almilaji as a grad student after his U.S. visa was revoked: This helps make the world a better place and it also makes Canada a better place.

You’d think other countries would realize this. #Sad Steve Yurkiw @stevey1963

Join the conversation on Twitter @uoftmagazine.

ILLUSTRATION: JONATHAN DYCK

HOW COULD THIS BE MORE BEAUTIFUL? Exploring the world with like-minded people makes the experience all the more vivid. The University of Toronto Alumni Travel Program offers wide-ranging opportunities to connect with alumni and other travellers who share your sense of adventure. These tours criss-cross the globe. They’re always fascinating, enriching and meticulously planned—down to every detail and flavour. What will turn your trip into a journey are the people you meet along the way.

Curious about this historic destination?

Visit the website to read about cruising the Elbe River and all 35 alumni trips for 2018. alumnitravel.utoronto.ca 1-800-463-6048 or 416-978-2367

U OF T IS LOOKING FOR A NEW CHANCELLOR The Chancellor Search Committee of the College of Electors invites nominations for Chancellor for a three-year term, commencing July 1, 2018 What Does the Chancellor Do? The Chancellor is an advocate for the university, and plays an essential role in advancing U of T’s interests within the local, provincial, national and international arenas. The ideal candidate will demonstrate excellence in their chosen field and in service to the community, and exhibit a strong public profile and well-developed relationship-building skills.

The Chancellor is elected by the College of Electors for a volunteer three-year term and may serve a maximum of two consecutive terms. The Chancellor is required under the University of Toronto Act, 1971, to be a Canadian citizen.

More information about the role, and the nomination form, are available at: uoft.me/CallNominationChancellor Nominations and requests for further information may be submitted in confidence to: Mr. Patrick F. McNeill, Secretary, Chancellor Search Committee College of Electors, University of Toronto 27 King’s College Circle, Room 106, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A1 416-978-8428, patrick.mcneill@utoronto.ca

The Honourable Michael H. Wilson will complete his final term as U of T’s Chancellor on June 30, 2018.

President’s Message

Expecting the Unexpected

U of T provides an unparalleled setting in which students can prepare for a world of possibilities

It is becoming a truism that today’s university students will need to reinvent themselves – perhaps more than once – throughout their careers. If so, what does this mean for how we educate them?

Readers may recall that we recently conducted our firstever Alumni Impact Survey. We had a great response from our community, for which we’re very grateful. We’ve just started analyzing the results, and we’ll be reporting back to you in the months to come. But I’m struck by one fascinating pattern we’ve already identified, which attests to the ability of U of T graduates to transition across an amazing range of fields, and to thrive in a succession of distinctly different roles.

Here’s just a small sampling of what we found: an investment banker who’s worked at NASA; a soprano who founded an artists’ management firm; a criminologist who’s a hostage negotiator and did two tours of duty as a reservist in Afghanistan; a geography and planning graduate who’s now an international business development executive and an accomplished photographer; a humanities major who was appointed by UNICEF as a Special Advocate for Children.

And these are just five of our nearly 570,000 living alumni around the globe.

In a time of seemingly unprecedented technological change, the pressure on university educators to emphasize specialization and deepen technical skills is steadily increasing. And yet, with the above stories in mind, it’s important to ask if we are serving our students’ best long-­ term interests by doing so, particularly as U of T embarks on the project of rethinking undergraduate education.

This raises the bigger question about the continuing value of a liberal education.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its definition of “liberal” as an adjective in this context, says that the word describes an education “directed to a general broadening of the mind.”

The value of this “general broadening” cannot be overstated.

It fosters curiosity, imagination and critical thinking, while enabling us to communicate and collaborate more effectively. It cultivates our capacity to reflect on ourselves and the world around us, and allows us to see possibilities throughout our lives that we might otherwise forgo. And it

fosters resiliency and well-roundedness that will serve our graduates in the future.

The University of Toronto offers its students unparalleled opportunities to develop these qualities. U of T is the only public institution in the world – and one of just three universities in total, along with Stanford and Columbia – to rank among the top 30 in every major academic category surveyed by the London-based Times Higher Education.

This uncommon breadth of excellence extends across our astonishing number of academic programs – more than 1,000, in fact, including some 700 undergraduate programs.

And compared to many of our peers, U of T makes it much easier for students to take advantage of these rich offerings, enabling them to combine specialist, major and minor programs according to their interests, and to change their areas of focus as their interests evolve.

In addition, we are working hard to provide an increasingly rich assortment of opportunities for undergraduate research, work-integrated learning, community engagement and international experience. And our undergraduate curricula are designed to foster the core competencies required for leadership in any field our graduates may wish to enter over the course of their careers.

Of course, not all U of T undergraduates enrol in a “liberal arts” program. But the benefits of “broadening” are equally pertinent, no matter what discipline they study. This has been recognized, for example, in the structure of many of our professional programs.

This broad-mindedness is clearly a powerful force for good, and in our increasingly polarized world, it remains profoundly relevant to our individual and collective success. It’s a reason to be proud of our membership in the U of T community, and confident in the vital importance of our academic mission.

In the 21st century, the openness, creativity and agility needed to reinvent oneself seems more important than ever. And that’s what a liberal education makes possible.

Sincerely, Meric Gertler

Winter 2018

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Calendar

MORE EVENTS! Check out the latest campus happenings at utoronto.ca.

Gabriel Orozco’s Sleeping Leaves (hojas durmiendo), 1990

Exhibitions

JANUARY 17 TO MARCH 3

Figures of Sleep Is sleep in crisis? This major international exhibition, curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan, considers the cultural anxieties around sleep in times of economic, social and technological transformation.

A large-scale installation by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss looks at stress-induced sleeplessness; French artist Sophie Calle’s photographs document people who spend a night sleeping in her bed; Toronto artist Jon Sasaki’s endurance dance work, “A Rest,” will be performed.

On January 25, the Art Museum will also host the Night of Ideas, an all-night event taking place simultaneously in more than 50 countries. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., artists, neuroscientists, philosophers and public thinkers will discuss “to sleep or not to sleep.”

Free. Exhibit: Tues. to Sat., 12–5 p.m. (to 8 p.m. on Wednesday). University of Toronto Art Centre, 15 King’s College Circle, and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 7 Hart House Circle. Night of Ideas: Jan. 25, 7 p.m.–7 a.m. artmuseum.utoronto.ca.

Alumni January 22 London, England President’s Reception and Presentation. Join U of T president Meric Gertler for an event that also features Prof. Mark Kingwell. Free.

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6:30–9 p.m. The Langham, 1C Portland Pl., Regent St. Register: alumni.utoronto.ca/events-andprograms/upcoming-events.

January 25 Montreal Alumni and Friends Dinner.

Enjoy an evening of great conversation and food. Free, but please bring a food dish or beverage to share. 6–9 p.m. This event will be held at a private residence in Montreal. Register at alumni. utoronto.ca/events-and-programs/ upcoming-events.

January 29 to April 27 Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Fleeting Moments, Floating Worlds, and the Beat Generation: The Photography of Allen Ginsberg. Free. Mon. to Fri., 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Thurs., 8 p.m.

120 St. George St. 416-978-5285.

Lectures and Symposia January 19 Rotman School of Management Daniel Pink talks about his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Pink has written several New York Times bestsellers about work and behaviour. $37 plus HST (includes a seat and a copy of When). 8–9 a.m. Desautels Hall (second floor, South Building), 105 St. George St. 416-978-6119, events@rotman.utoronto.ca or rotman.utoronto.ca/events.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF GABRIEL OROZCO AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

Come cheer on your Varsity Blues as they vie for national swimming titles in February. World champion Kylie Masse (right) will be there!

Beginning January 30 Toronto Canadian Perspectives Lecture Series. $15 per lecture; $55 for five lectures. 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays. Carlton Cinema, 20 Carlton St. senior.alumni@ utoronto.ca or uoft.me/saacp.

a symposium addressing issues of accessibility and physical activity, leading up to the Paralympic Games. UTSC’s David Onley is master of ceremonies. Free.

100 Devonshire Pl. Info on speakers and tickets available soon at kpe.ca/mobilizing-change.

January 30 U of T Mississauga 2017 Annual Research Excellence Lecture. UTM politics prof Ronald Beiner will deliver a talk centring on Nietzsche and Heidegger, in light of the recent rise of populist right-wing ideologies and political movements. Free.

2–4 p.m. Davis Building, Rm 3130, 3359 Mississauga Rd. rong.wu@ utoronto.ca or 905-569-5768.

March 1 and 2 Jackman Humanities Building Roseman Lecture in Practical Ethics. Speaker: Tommy Shelby, the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard and author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Free.

March 1: 2–4 p.m. March 2: 3–5 p.m.

170 St. George St. Rm 100 (main floor, Lecture Hall) 416-978-3311, jovana.jankovic@utoronto.ca or philosophy.utoronto.ca.

January 31 Rotman School of Management Adam Grant discusses his new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (co-written by Sheryl Sandberg). $34 plus HST (includes one seat and a hardcover copy of Option B).

Noon–1 p.m. Desautels Hall (second floor, South Building), 105 St. George St. 416-978-6122, events@rotman.utoronto.ca or rotman.utoronto.ca/events.

February 6 Rotman School of Management Gretchen Rubin talks about her new book, The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better. $49 plus HST (includes seat, reception and copy of book). 5–6:45 p.m. Desautels Hall (second floor, South Building), 105 St. George St. 416-978-6122, events@rotman.utoronto.ca or rotman.utoronto.ca/events.

March 1 Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport Mobilizing Change: Enhancing Physical Activity Accessibility.

The Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education is hosting

PHOTO: IAN MCNICOL

March 6 Walter Hall Howard Shore, Louis Applebaum Distinguished Visitor in Film Composition, delivers a lecture.

Free. 7:30 p.m. 80 Queen’s Pk.

Music January 21 to 28 Faculty of Music New Music Festival features Canadian composer, sound artist and keyboardist Nicole Lizée, the Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition. For a list of festival events and locations: music.utoronto.ca/concerts-events.

February 15 Walter Hall Teng Li (viola) and Lydia Wong (piano) perform works from a variety of composers. Part of the Thursdays at Noon series.

Free. 12:10 p.m. 80 Queen’s Pk. music.utoronto.ca/concerts-events.

March 15 to 18 MacMillan Theatre Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing opera production. March 15 to 17:

7:30 p.m. March 18: 2:30 p.m.

80 Queen’s Pk. Tickets: 416-408-0208. music.utoronto.ca.

Special Events January to March Innis Town Hall Canadian Film Forum. Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute present an ongoing series celebrating the very best in Canadian cinema. Jan. 24: Sleeping Giant with director Andrew Cividino.

Feb. 28: Unarmed Verses with director Charles Officer. March 22: How Heavy This Hammer with director Kazik Radwanski. Free.

7–9 p.m. 2 Sussex Ave. Register: alumni.innis.utoronto.ca. For more information: alumni.innis@ utoronto.ca.

March 22 to 24 Hart House Theatre Seasons by Only Human Dance Collective. U of T’s dance club celebrates their 19th anniversary with a dance show featuring ballet, hip hop and many more genres. $15 ($12 on Thursday; group discounts available).

8 p.m. 7 Hart House Circle. For tickets: uofttix.ca or 416-978-8849.

For more information, please contact Christine Foo at ohdc. marketing@gmail.com or ohdc.sa.­ utoronto.ca.

Theatre January 19 to February 3 Hart House Theatre The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

When a jilted lover seeks revenge, a religious community is thrown into turmoil, and the law begins to turn on the very residents it should protect. $28 ($17 for seniors, $15 for students). 8 p.m. (also 2 p.m. on Feb. 3). 7 Hart House Circle.

Tickets: 416-978-8849 or harthouse.ca/the-crucible.

February 8 to 10 Hart House Theatre U of T Drama Festival. A week of competitive theatre, written, directed and performed by students in association with the U of T Drama Coalition. $12 ($10 for seniors and students). 7:30 p.m.

7 Hart House Circle. Tickets: 416-978-8849 or harthouse­.ca/ u-of-t-drama-festival-2018.

Sports

March 2 to 10 Hart House Theatre Titus Andronicus. Widely considered Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, this play tells the story of a Roman general returning from war, who becomes embroiled in a circle of bloody revenge with his enemies. Warning: Extreme violence and sexual violence. $28 ($17 for seniors, $15 for students).

8 p.m. (also 2 p.m. on March 10).

7 Hart House Circle. Tickets: harthouse.ca/titus-andronicus or 416-978-8849.

February 22 to 24 Athletic Centre 2018 U SPORTS National Swimming Championships.

Come cheer on your Varsity Blues as they vie for national titles in the Varsity Pool. The meet will feature many international stars, including world champion Kylie Masse. Feb. 22 to 23: 6 p.m.

Feb. 24: 5 p.m. 55 Harbord St. For tickets: varsityblues.ca/tickets.

For more information, please visit varsityblues.ca.

March 15 to 17 and 22 to 24 U of T Scarborough 10 Out of 12 is the Theatre and Performance Studies senior student production. Ever wonder what it’s like to put on a play? Anne Washburn’s comedy is a love letter to the theatre, and an exploration of the human desire to turn the mundane into the magical. Presented with Samuel French Inc. 8 p.m. Leigha Lee Browne Theatre, 1265 Military Trail. uoft.me/acm-events. acmconnects­@utsc.utoronto.ca.

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SAVE THE DATE FOR NEXT YEAR’S REUNION. MAY 30–JUNE 3, 2018 See you at our annual alumni weekend. Next spring, the University of Toronto will celebrate graduating classes with years ending in 3 or 8. We’re planning special events for honoured years but all alumni are always welcome. With more than 130 events to choose from, there’s something for every U of T graduate at our 2018 reunion.

Calling all alumni to U of T Flagship Events

What’s happening at your College or Faculty?

Wednesday, May 30 SHAKER for Young Alumni

Many U of T colleges, faculties and departments host special events for their own alumni.

Thursday, May 31 LGBTQ Spring Soirée Friday, June 1 50th Anniversary Ceremony Chancellor’s Circle Medal Ceremonies for 55th to 80th anniversaries Stress-Free Degree lectures Saturday, June 2 Stress-Free Degree lectures, campus tours and other events U of T Alumni Celebration Alumni BBQ Kids’ Passport to U of T

Registration for all events opens in March 2018 at: springreunion.utoronto.ca

FIND OUT MORE: 1-888-738-8876 416-978-5881 spring.reunion@utoronto.ca

Life on Campus

“ There’s a passion in my bones that has always tugged at me to help the homeless” U of T student Deanna Lentini, founder of Fix the 6ix

p. 13

U of T president Meric Gertler (right) meets students at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Rwanda

Our Partners in Africa On a visit to Ethiopia and Rwanda, U of T president Meric Gertler affirms the power of collaborations – and sees potential for new ones WHEN UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESIDENT Meric Gertler first began consulting with U of T community members about making global partnerships one of the university’s key priorities, colleagues advised him not to limit collaborations to the most obvious choices.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF MASTERCARD FOUNDATION SCHOLARS PROGRAM

“We talked about how we should think about regions like Africa, where not only are U of T faculty and students helping countries move along a progressive path, but also where we can learn a lot from those experiences ourselves,” he says.

Recently, Gertler visited Ethiopia and Rwanda as part of the university’s ongoing efforts to raise U of T’s global profile and promote international partnerships. It was his first time travelling to Africa and likely the first official visit by a U of T president to the continent. In an interview after his return, Gertler says he saw signs that the educational systems are developing rapidly and that economic growth is robust.

“I came away with a heightened sense of excitement about the potential for the U of T to contribute to and learn from engagement with our African partners,” he says.

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Life on Campus

U of T: Top of the Class in Canada

U of T

UBC

McGill

Times Higher Education World University Rankings

22

1st

34

2nd

42

3rd

QS World University Rankings

31

1st

51

3rd

32

2nd

U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities Rankings

20

1st

27

2nd

49

3rd

Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities

23

1st

31

2nd

67

4th

National Taiwan University Ranking

4

1st

27

2nd

36

3rd

In Ethiopia, Gertler saw first-hand the results of a 14-year collaboration between U of T and Addis Ababa University that has helped transform health care and higher education in that country.

When the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration began, Ethiopia, a country of 73 million people, had only 11 psychiatrists. Today, the number is 80. And those graduates have developed psychiatry departments at several other institutions across the country.

The collaboration has grown as well – from a single discipline to 21, including pharmacy, dentistry, anesthesiology, engineering and library sciences. Dr. Jane Philpott, now federal minister of Indigenous Services (and still a professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine), helped start the family medicine training program in Ethiopia in 2013.

On average, 80 U of T faculty, students and alumni travel to Addis Ababa every year to volunteer for academic training, research collaboration, teaching, clinical supervision and mentorship. “A lot of people talk about capacity development in Africa,” Gertler says. “One model is to bring African students to Canada, the U.S. or the U.K., educate them and hope they’ll return and do good things in their home countries or elsewhere in Africa. Another approach is to work in Africa.

Over 95 per cent of the graduates from this collaboration

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It’s unanimous: U of T takes first place in Canada, and is cited as one of the top publicly funded universities worldwide, in five of the most prestigious international university rankings. The Times Higher Education report ranked U of T first in Canada for the eighth year in a row – and 22ⁿd out of 1,000 globally.

“We’re proud the University of Toronto has once again been named one of the top global universities, which demonstrates the tremendous impact of our research and our world-­ class performance in teaching,” says Prof. Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-­ president of research and innovation.

U of T also rated highly in the Shanghai Subjects Ranking, with top25 placements in 25 different subject areas – including second in the world in psychology research.

In the 2017 National Taiwan University Ranking, U of T remains the world’s top public university for the fourth year on account of its research excellence in a wide range of disciplines. – SALLY CHOI

have remained in Ethiopia and have gone on to do great things. That’s an astounding track record.”

Gertler says he was also impressed by the reciprocal nature of the Addis Ababa program. U of T faculty told him they found their work there rewarding and that they were learning from their Ethiopian counterparts about tackling challenges with limited resources.

In Rwanda, Gertler participated in the annual conference of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, which provides financial support for qualified and disadvantaged students from sub-Saharan Africa to pursue higher education at institutions such as U of T. Since 2013, students have come to the University of Toronto from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia and other African countries. The scholarship covers tuition in the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. It also pays for books, living expenses and airfare.

Last June, U of T graduated its first cohort of Mastercard Foundation scholars. Gertler says having students on campus from across Africa has changed the university’s outlook on how to prioritize international partnerships. “Their presence has helped to elevate interest among faculty and students and staff in Africa.” – NOREEN AHMED-ULLAH

Life on Campus

Deanna Lentini

Is Ending Homelessness in Toronto Possible?

For U of T student and Fix the 6ix founder Deanna Lentini, it’s a mission SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHY. But ever since Deanna Lentini was

five years old, she has felt compelled to help those living on the streets. As a young child, she’d ask her dad for coins to give to homeless people. By the time she was in high school, her allowance jingled in her pockets, ready to be handed to panhandlers. At 15, she started volunteering at a shelter.

“There’s a passion in my bones that has always tugged at

NAMECHECK

Velut arbor ævo

PHOTO: JEFF KIRK

me to help the homeless,” says Lentini, now a 23-year-old U of T student.

In 2016, she founded Fix the 6ix, which has amassed more than $4,000 worth of donated gift cards that have bought food, clothing and other necessities for the homeless. Fix the 6ix volunteers have also collected about 19,000 Raptor ticket stubs. (At a winning home game, where the Raptors score more than 100 points, each ticket holder is entitled to a free slice of pizza.) Those ticket stubs can be redeemed at Pizza Pizza.

To establish her volunteer-run organization – with its no-cost donation model – Lentini postponed starting her master’s. During the past school year, she worked full time but devoted her evenings and weekends to Fix the 6ix. By December, she had hit the wall. “I was completely exhausted,” she says. But she’d get right back at it after reading the yellow sticky-note on her desk: “People have it harder than you.

You need to do this for them.”

Starting her master’s in physical therapy in September hasn’t diminished her drive. Between classes, writing essays and studying, she painstakingly records the amount on each donated gift card.

Soft-spoken, she is also learning how to speak up for the homeless. Recently, Lentini was on a subway car where a woman was asking for money. When the woman got off, another passenger blurted out, “She has a chauffeur waiting for her at Eglinton. They’re all liars.”

Summoning her courage, Lentini confronted the man, saying, “Imagine the dignity she had to give up to ask for help.” When Lentini got off the subway car, she was shaking.

“These people need our help,” she says, citing a U of T study that found that panhandlers live in extreme poverty and their single largest expense is food.

Lentini has big plans for Fix the 6ix, including installing gift-­card donation boxes in cafés so people can easily donate the cards they have lying around. But her grandest personal plan is to end homelessness in Toronto. “In order to create affordable housing, one day I’ll run for city council,” she promises.

– SUSAN PEDWELL

Put together two open books with a beaver at the base, the Royal and Imperial Crown, and an oak tree at the top, and you’ll have the University of Toronto’s coat of arms – designed in 1857 by President Daniel Wilson. The tree – originally a maple, but later changed to an oak for unknown reasons – reflects the university’s motto, “Velut arbor ævo.”

The Latin phrase is translated as “may it grow as a tree through the ages” in a 1935 U of T

Monthly article. The words in the motto are an excerpt from Horace’s Odes: “crescit occulto velut arbor ævo fama Marcelli,” meaning “the fame of [Roman military leader] Marcellus grows like a tree over time unseen.”

The exact translation is open, but another rendition is “as a tree with the passage of time” – and the image of evolving and growing stronger over the years is a fitting metaphor for U of T students themselves. – NADIA SIU VAN

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Life on Campus

SOUND BITES

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?

I quit my two jobs in Brazil, sold everything (my house included) and moved to Canada with my pregnant wife, my six year old and no job after being selected for the Federal Skilled Worker Immigration stream.

Now I’m an assistant professor @UTM (one-year contract). @rafaelchiuzi

Opening up. I used to be an introvert; scared of people and judgments. Now I’m a networking hustler! @kastincu

Women Are in the House!

In September, Parliament Hill played host to U of T Women in House, a non-partisan program in which 100 female U of T students were paired with an MP or senator for a day. “The program aims to tackle the daunting challenge of gender inequality by taking practical local steps,” says U of T Munk School’s Tina Park, who co-founded the program with MP Carolyn Bennett (MD 1974) in 2013. “It always excites me to imagine our students’ potential and the impact that this experience will have in how they see politics.”

Poll

Participants took a tour of the Supreme Court of Canada and engaged in a Q&A with Supreme Court Justice Andromache Karakatsanis (BA 1978 VIC).

“The program has solidified my aspirations to pursue a career in politics,” wrote second-year student Katrina Van Genderen in an essay about the event. “These MPs are just normal people who worked very hard and accumulated experience to get where they are. Being successful in politics no longer seems like an insurmountable goal.”

– SALLY CHOI

The scariest thing I’ve ever done is watch my first horror movie: the It movie. @AlkhalidySarah

Join the conversation at twitter.com/uoftmagazine.

Have you ever switched majors?

“I took one women and gender studies class to fill an elective space – and I fell in love with it,” says fourth-year student Alexandra Da Silva, who majored in cognitive science in first year. So she changed programs – a common theme among students in our poll.

Third-year undergrad Elly Verlinden veered from chemistry to earth sciences to fit her career goal: “I found earth sciences to be a little more of an applied science and a little more practical for future work prospects.”

Whatever the reason for switching, the majority are happy with the outcome. Fourth-year art history specialist Nadia Bortolazzo, who originally majored in history and political science, says: “My grades improved a lot because I now like what I’m doing.” – SALLY CHOI This highly unscientific poll of 100 students was conducted at Gerstein library and Sidney Smith Hall in October.

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42% Yes

58% No

PHOTO: TINA PARK; ILLUSTRATION: ALINA SKYSON

Life on Campus

Celeste Yim

Among comedian Steven Wright’s most famous lines: “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research”

“Weekend Update,” I was also reading Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. So I really had a kind of “woven” experience of comedy and literature.

Poehler and Atwood: now that’s an interesting hybrid. (Laughs). But straight white men have actually been my main influences . . . Still, I think a lot about who I am as a standup, which is a young, racialized woman. It’s interesting to have strayed from watching Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Birbiglia and John Mulaney to creating my own persona – which is so different from the mainstream.

You recently held a summer job with Instagram.

Social media has made comedy so sharp: those hilarious Twitter riffs remind me of the great Steven Wright and his one-liners. Steven Wright was the first comic I ever watched: my gateway comic, if you will! And yes, social media makes comedy so shareable. It lets you use your voice, condense it and manipulate it in a way that’s really digestible; it lets you touch so many lives.

P.O.V.

Divine Comedy Trinity College student Celeste Yim is on a mission to get students laughing YOU CAN’T MAJOR IN COMEDY at U of T, but don’t tell Celeste Yim

that. For almost four years, the Trinity College student of media, gender and English has been on a mission to get students laughing – as humour editor of the Strand, former head of the Trinity College Comedy Collective and one of the head writers of the UC Follies (the show that gave Lorne Michaels and Wayne and Shuster their starts). Yim – who is the newest member of the Sketchersons, a comedy troupe that performs weekly at Comedy Bar in Toronto – explored the serious business of being funny with Cynthia Macdonald.

Who’s influenced you? I grew up watching Saturday Night Live – the women on that show were really influential for me.

But in high school, while I was watching Amy Poehler on

PHOTO: MAYA WONG

Sometimes you look at old routines from the 1960s and all comics are telling long, involved stories. The comedy is so quick now. And comedy has to be good, because especially with sketch we’re asking these audiences to pay attention to us for pretty much no reason.

And they pay money to see our shows and they spend time listening to what we have to say. I feel pretty aware of wasting people’s time and I really don’t want to do that. It’s been really interesting to form these groups of people – whether it’s sketch or Trinity College Comedy Collective or the Strand – and see all these different opinions and styles and connect that to audiences. It’s been so interesting to do that and fail many times. But also to succeed and have people come to us and praise us, that’s really cool.

Your comedy tackles serious social subjects – racism, self-­ image and hookups. How important is it that we sometimes deliver these messages with a spoonful of sugar? Very. It’s been a really cathartic experience to be able to address things that many of my peers feel in ways that are poignant, and sometimes difficult to approach. And for me, comedy’s just another part of the academic experience – another form of reading and writing, of storytelling and narrative. It’s hard to divorce these activities from my academic life as they all co-exist.

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Life on Campus

With Restored Sight Comes Opportunity and Hope

A DONATION FROM Pyarali G. Nanji

and his family will establish a chair in the department of ophthalmology and vision sciences, marking an important boost for eye-care initiatives at U of T. The chair will be held for a fiveyear term by Dr. Sherif El-Defrawy, an eye surgeon, researcher and award-­winning teacher. A large portion of the funds will support health missions by members of the department, including El-Defrawy, to Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Gulshan and Pyarali Nanji (front) and family with Haiti and other low- and middle-­ Dr. Sherif El-Defrawy income countries.

“We spend our days performing cataract surgery and corneal transplantation surgery – restoring vision and sometimes allowing people to see for the first time in their lives,” El-Defrawy explains. Local surgeons who have not had the opportunity to be trained in eye surgery attend the sessions, first observing and then performing operations themselves under supervision. In the evenings, he says, the Canadians give lectures or host discussions on a surgical topic.

When the Canadians return home, they have not only transformed the lives of hundreds of patients, but they’ve equipped the local surgeons to continue the work. “This gift will make an enormous difference,” El-Defrawy says, noting that vision is critical to a person’s autonomy.

“When vision is lost, individuals become unable to work and provide for themselves.

And because in most of these countries there is no social safety net, vision loss often leads to being destitute. Cataract surgery can mean people are able to prepare their own food again or go back to doing constructive work. It relieves a burden on the whole family.”

The Nanji family has been supporting hospitals and health care in Canada for more than four decades – ever since Pyarali and his wife, Gulshan, emigrated from Uganda with their four children in 1972.

Motivated by a desire to give back to their adopted country, they have donated millions of dollars to causes that are close to their hearts. “Canada is a very humanitarian country,” says Pyarali. “At the same time, we have to make more effort to help underdeveloped countries.”

With this new donation, the Nanjis are not only supporting a needed medical service, but providing opportunity and hope. “We really wish, from the heart, to give people the gift of sight so they can see the light of all the world,” says Pyarali.

Why I Give Gord Dorrett

A gift from the Nanji family to U of T will help people “see the light of all the world”

The Art of Design As the executive director and past president of FORREC, a Toronto-based company that designs entertainment experiences around the world, Gord Dorrett (BLA 1981) is used to answering tough questions about his designs from clients. He credits U of T’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design for giving him – and many others at his company – the tools to do this well. FORREC has given $100,000 to support a “critique room” at the new Daniels Building.

Gord: Doing critiques is a huge part of any design school. Students present their designs to their professors and fellow students – and often to invited professionals and guests. It’s why designers grow a thick skin. You put your heart and soul up on the wall, and somebody tears it apart. It’s exactly what happens in the outside world. You have to present your work, and you have to be able to back it up. Those of us who grew up in design schools – and that’s many of the staff at FORREC – see the “crit room” as building character – and as a positive forum for constructive feedback.

We feel that the new Daniels Building is going to elevate design and design thinking in Canada. U of T is incredibly fortunate to have it. We believe in it.

And we said, “OK, what can we do to help?” – AS TOLD TO SCOTT ANDERSON The new Daniels Building, which includes the FORREC Crit Room and other critique spaces, opened officially in November.

– JANET ROWE

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PHOTO: LEFT, MATTHEW VOLPE; RIGHT, TERRY CLULEY PHOTOGRAPHY

Life on Campus

Prof. Jack Canfield was a founding member of the Toronto Zen Centre

IN MEMORIAM

A Scholar Who Spoke Up for an Entire People The question of a Kurdish homeland was central to Prof. Amir Hassanpour’s life and career

Amir Hassanpour IN THE MANY TRIBUTES and memories that poured in for Amir Hassanpour after his death at 73 from cancer this summer, there was one that showed the astonishing reach of his scholarship on Kurdish nationalism and language. An old friend wrote that when she mentioned his name to a Kurdish refugee she was teaching, the girl knew all about Hassanpour – despite having been on the move and in camps for years.

The Kurdish question – which refers to the fact that the Kurdish people do not have a homeland – was central to Hassanpour’s life and career. He was born in 1943 in the

IN MEMORIAM

Jack Canfield A passionate Wittgenstein scholar, he also pursued a spiritual practice in the Zen tradition

PHOTO: TOP, COURTESY OF SHAHRZAD MOJAB

Kurdish city of Mahabad in western Iran and attended the University of Tehran in the early 1960s. During these formative years, he became involved in the Iranian student movement and was introduced to Marxism.

Hassanpour started graduate studies in the U.S. in 1975, but returned home shortly after to play a significant role in the early years of the Iranian Revolution as a secular, leftist revolutionary. When Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979, Hassanpour, his wife Shahrzad Mojab – now a prof at OISE – and their newborn son had to leave Iran for their safety.

Throughout his career, he wrote and published extensively on the Kurdish question and on social movements, diaspora, genocide and Marxist-feminist theory. In all of this work, says U of T colleague Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, there was an “unwavering commitment to social justice and equality.”

Hassanpour joined U of T’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 1999 after teaching at the University of Windsor and Concordia University. (The department is now raising funds to establish an annual lecture in his honour.) He was a tenacious debater with strong views, says chair Tim Harrison. “But he never lost sight of the collegial spirit. Though colleagues may not always have agreed with his positions, he was uniformly respected and appreciated.”

To students, Hassanpour was a beloved teacher and mentor.

“He embodied not only dedication, but also a passionate engagement,” says Harrison. “He connected with students on a one-on-one level, and it made him very popular.”

A memorial took place in July at Innis College (home of Cinema Studies) – which was special to him because of his love of film. His son, Salah, shared this passion, along with a great appreciation for Star Trek. The TV show was “interested in imagining a different future, a far better one than today,” he says, “much like my father himself.” – MEGAN EASTON

He was a distinguished Wittgenstein scholar with his own strong philosophical views.

But Jack Canfield – a professor emeritus at U of T Mississauga who died in August at 82 – was also known for keeping an open mind to alternate arguments. “He was a passionate philosopher, but also a patient and a sympathetic one, who listened carefully to the views of others,” says philosophy professor Bernard Katz.

Canfield was deeply influenced by Austrian-­ British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about mind and language, as well as his own spiritual practice in the Zen tradition – and he explored the relationship between the two in his work. His last book, Becoming Human, was a culmination of this exploration: he traced the origin of language in the journey

from hominid to human. Canfield saw no essential difference between humans and other animals, except the uniqueness of language, says Katz. “Jack would say ‘Humans can understand a New Yorker cartoon, but our fellow creatures can’t,’” Katz recalls. “He was very interested in the state of humanity before developing and acquiring language – before becoming human.”

Katz describes Canfield as an “unpretentious” and natural writer. He often reviewed papers and offered feedback to Katz. “I always sought his advice on stylistic matters as well as philosophical ones; he had an elegant, clear style, for which he was well-known,” says Katz.

“Though what I’ll remember most is not his suggestions, but his unwavering support and encouraging words.” – NADIA SIU VAN

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Leading Edge

“ Tweets from President Trump provide excellent sound bites for the Kim regime to justify further spending on its military” The Munk School’s Tina Park on the state of U.S.-North Korea relations

p. 24

Prof. J.B. Caron of ecology and evolutionary biology studies fossils of ancient creatures to illuminate how life evolved

The Big Bang Life on Earth exploded about 540 million years ago. Scientists are now beginning to understand why TODAY, THE PORTION OF THE CANADIAN ROCKIES that stretches

through southeastern British Columbia is known for some of the country’s most spectacular mountain scenery, drawing hikers, skiers and wilderness lovers from around the world.

But when Jean-Bernard Caron visits the area, his attention is focused on the rocks beneath his feet – rocks that bear witness

PHOTO: IAN PATTERSON

to an era hundreds of millions of years before the ski lifts opened for business.

Caron, a U of T professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is an expert on the Burgess Shale – an outcropping of sedimentary rock in Yoho National Park in B.C. that contains the preserved remains of a remarkable array of animals.

These fossils provide a tantalizing glimpse into what life on our planet was like in the latter part of the Cambrian period, about half a billion years ago. While hardly anything larger than a single cell existed for Earth’s first three billion years, the Cambrian saw the rise of a staggering variety of complex creatures – animals with legs and gills and compound eyes.

Paleontologists call this evolutionary burst the “Cambrian explosion.” In spite of the name, the “explosion” actually

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Leading Edge

lasted millions of years, Caron explains, from about 540 million to 505 million years ago – though that’s still pretty quick in terms of the history of life on Earth. “It’s a unique event,” says Caron, who is also senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum. “You have the evolution of all of the major groups of animals in a short period of time.”

In other words, the Burgess Shale fossils illuminate a crucial chapter in the history of life.

That chapter unfolded in the water: back then, what is now the side of a mountain would have been 100 metres below sea level. Not much was happening on land or in the air. The continents were barren, and it would be another hundred million years before the first insects buzzed in the sky. It was also milder than it is today.

And so nature’s great experiment with larger and more complicated body types occurred in the warm Cambrian seas, especially on the ocean floor.

The cause of the Cambrian explosion has proven difficult to pin down. “It remains one of the biggest unresolved scientific controversies – in paleontology, at least,” says Caron. One recent theory is that chemical changes in Earth’s oceans allowed animals to make use of minerals such as calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate and silicon dioxide for the first time, leading to the development of the first bones, shells and teeth.

Another idea is that a kind of evolutionary “arms race” occurred between predators and prey, as organisms for the first time needed to find others to feed on (and to avoid being eaten themselves), developing more complex bodies in the process. However, Caron says this may have been a result of the explosion rather than a cause. A relatively sudden increase in oxygen levels in the atmosphere and oceans could have also played a role – but this could have already been happening tens of millions of years earlier.

Ultimately, says Caron, multiple factors may have been at play.

Our best clues for solving this mystery may be the fossils themselves. And as vast as the ROM’s collection is, Caron is certain there’s much more to be found. “We’re only scratching the surface,” he says. – DAN FALK

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Prof. Nicholas Rule’s lab has found that some cultures have better “gaydar” than others.

Americans were tops, with 63 per cent accuracy

A Distinctive Look?

English-Canadians are pretty good at identifying French-Canadian faces but the reverse isn’t true

THE ENGLISH AND FRENCH have co-existed in Canada for more than 150 years,

and some of us have become adept at telling each other apart based on how we look, research by a U of T grad student has found.

Thora Bjornsdottir, a PhD candidate in psychology, and Prof. Greg West, at Université de Montréal, asked groups of English- and French-Canadians to look at pictures of faces and identify them as English- or French-­ Canadian. All the faces were Caucasian.

The English group made the correct identification 62 per cent of the time – significantly above chance. The French group, on the other hand, scored 51 per cent – not much better than chance. The English also remembered members of their own group better and thought they looked more Canadian. Similarly, the French identified the people they thought were members of their group as more Canadian.

Both groups stereotyped French-Canadian faces as “warmer” and English-­Canadian faces as “more dominant.” But the faces of French- and English-Canadians do not actually differ in this way. Instead, the French-­ Canadian faces appeared more “distinctive” than the English-Canadian faces (participants defined the term subjectively) – a difference that the English-­ Canadian participants used to make accurate categorizations.

Bjornsdottir works in the lab of Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor who studies people’s first visual impressions of “perceptually ambiguous groups,” such as members of the LGBTQ community, or liberals and conservatives. She says this kind of research helps explain how first impressions colour our interactions with people. “The face is what we look at first, and our reaction to a face affects how we interact with people later.

It can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.”

She adds that these findings can also help different groups understand each other better and alleviate conflicts between them. – SCOTT ANDERSON Thora Bjornsdottir’s research is supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY

Leading Edge

STARTUP

According to Vicis Labs, half of Canadian millennials live from paycheque to paycheque, with less than $1,000 in the bank

IN THE BURGEONING wealth-manage-

ment industry, customers with lots of money to invest have always gained the lion’s share of attention from both the big banks and the growing ranks of startups elbowing into this business.

But when Tricia Jose (MASc 2017), the 25-year-old founder of Vicis Labs, began scouting for market niches, she took the classic entrepreneurial left turn and headed off in the opposite direction – toward millennials and freelancers toiling in the gig economy who struggle to manage their irregular incomes, much less save anything.

Sprout, a web-based platform created by Vicis Labs, uses predictive data analytics to assess an individual’s transaction history and to develop strategies for timing bill payments and managing cash flow during dry spells. The service will be launched early this year.

Jose didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur in the booming “fintech” sector. After completing a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at U of T, she teamed up with two MBA students at the Rotman School of Management and a third student in the Munk School of Global Affairs. Together, they developed an app to help low-income families in the developing world manage their money. They saw it as a way of improving the quality of life for people living under tremendous duress. Financial well-being, as she says, is closely tied to physical and mental well-being.

The app won a competition in the Middle East. But realizing they’d have to relocate to the developing world to properly launch their product, Jose and her collaborators shelved their initial plan and instead adapted it to an overlooked Canadian demographic that also contends with financial precarity.

When her team began its research, they quickly discovered that many in this market segment had difficulty setting aside money for taxes – a process done automatically for people with standard employment income. Sprout has an option that diverts a portion of income to a tax reserve fund. “Tax is our wedge,” Jose adds. “If we can get people to set aside their taxes, then we can get them to contribute to an RSP. It’s an opportunity to be at the centre of their economic lives.”

Having participated in more than one Toronto business accelerator, Jose has built Sprout on financing from family and friends as well as a $10,000 grant from Behavioural Economics in Action, a group at the Rotman School. She completed a soft launch of the product and is aiming for a round of angel financing in the next few months. Once established, Jose sees Sprout relying on a subscription model. “We’re trying to target people differently than our competitors,” she says. – JOHN LORINC

Save Your Money

An app from Vicis Labs aims to helps millennials and the precariously employed manage their cash

ILLUSTRATION: SAM ISLAND

Findings The Age Advantage

It’s been known for years that the oldest children in class perform better in school than their youngest classmates. But according to a new study co-authored by U of T Scarborough economist Elizabeth Dhuey, that gap can persist, with older children more likely to attend post-secondary school and graduate from an elite university.

The study, by Dhuey and a team of three economists from U.S.-based universities, followed differences between children in Florida who were born just before and after the Sept. 1 cut-off date to start kindergarten.

(In Ontario, the cut-off date is Jan. 1.)

What was surprising, says Dhuey, is that the effect is fairly significant and is experienced across all socioeconomic groups. She adds that these are average statistics, though. “There are plenty of December-born children who are doing just fine.” – DON CAMPBELL Testing Fluoride’s Safety Fluoride in the urine of pregnant women correlates with lower measures of intelligence in their children, according to U of T researchers. “Our study shows that the growing fetal nervous system may be adversely affected by higher levels of fluoride exposure,” says Dr. Howard Hu, the study’s lead author and a professor at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Tap water and dental products have been fluoridated in Canada and the U.S. for more than 60 years to prevent cavities and improve bone health.

Recently, fierce debate over the safety of water fluoridation – particularly for children’s developing brains – has prompted researchers to explore the issue and provide evidence to inform national drinking water standards.

For the study, the researchers analyzed urine samples from 287 mothers in Mexico City during pregnancy and from their children between six and 12 years of age. – NICOLE BODNAR

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Leading Edge

SENIORS HAVE GROWN SO concerned about their safety online that some avoid even low-risk activities such as online banking and shopping that could make their lives easier, a U of T study has found.

Cosmin Munteanu, a professor in UTM’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, and Hiba Rafih, a master’s student in information, recently conducted in-depth interviews with 10 people between the ages of 60 and 80 in their homes and observed their online behaviour, particularly with respect to banking, shopping and pharmacy refills.

If anything, says Munteanu, they were overly prudent. Although none of the interviewees had ever fallen for a scam, they sometimes flagged as suspicious bona fide announcements from charities or emails from friends.

A 66-year-old retiree, for example, was so concerned about her digital security that she took her laptop to a trusted dealer once a month for inspection – at considerable cost and effort. It wasn’t that she lacked computer proficiency. She’d had a computer for at least a decade and used it to watch videos, conduct research and write emails.

Munteanu found the seniors in his small study were particularly mistrustful of shops and banks that lack real-world locations for consumers to visit, such as Amazon or Tangerine. “Older adults trust the security of in-person transactions more than online ones,” he says. “They want to know who to talk to if something goes wrong.”

The seniors were also reluctant to try anything new online unless there was a significant benefit – and this benefit had to outweigh the perceived risk. Everyone makes this calculation, but seniors assign more weight to the risk. As a result they may not use technologies that would make their lives easier. “Good luck getting them to order Foodora or UberEats,” says Munteanu.

Digital literacy tends to fall off after 60, he adds, in part because people are less inclined to keep up with new technologies after they retire. But the learning process is further eroded by a lack of trust in online services that are new or unfamiliar to them. If people “don’t trust the provider, they’re not going to engage with the service,” says Munteanu. “They’re not going to try.”

His advice to people with older relatives: Emphasize the benefits, as well as the risks, of online activities.

Seniors Want to Know Whom They Can Trust Online

U of T study finds older Canadians are highly concerned about digital security – sometimes to their disadvantage

Findings The Innovative Get Richer

A new study co-authored by Ruben Gaetani, a management prof at U of T Mississauga, suggests that innovation is leading to the economic segregation of urban areas in the United States.

The researchers compared patent data from 1990 to 2010 with measures of economic segregation, such as income, education and occupation.

They found that the level of patenting – what they call “innovative intensity” – is responsible for 56 per cent of the variation in economic segregation among cities.

The study defines urban economic segregation as inequality across city-­ regions or neighbourhoods and says that this “accounts for the majority of the widening spatial inequality in the United States.” – STAFF Influence in Medical Publishing About half of the editors of 52 prestigious American medical journals received payments from the pharmaceutical and medical device industry in 2014. Only a fraction of these journals publish conflict-of-interest policies for editors that address these payments, according to new U of T research.

Financial ties between medical researchers and industry have come under increased scrutiny. Authors of papers published in most medical journals are required to disclose their funding sources and other conflicts of interest. But similar policies are less common for journal editors – despite their influence.

“Payments to editors are quite common, and they can be substantial,” says Jessica Liu, the lead author and a U of T professor of medicine. “Academic journal editors decide what gets published.” As a result, “journals should think about having transparent conflict-of-interest policies for editors,” says Liu. – HEIDI SINGER

– BRENT LEDGER

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ILLUSTRATION: SANDI FALCONER

Leading Edge

Deus, before and after dental treatment

THE BIG IDEA

Bringing Smiles to Uganda On a two-week visit to remote villages, a U of T dental team fixes teeth – and changes lives WHEN 28-YEAR-OLD taxi driver Deus lost his teeth in a collision

in southern Uganda, he also lost his job: his boss didn’t like his face anymore.

“If people lose their front teeth, they are shunned,” explains Izchak Barzilay (DDS 1983), an instructor at U of T and the head of prosthodontics and restorative dentistry at Mount Sinai Hospital. “It’s hard to get a job, it’s hard to get married. So we give them that opportunity back. We give them their smile back.”

For the last five years, Barzilay has accompanied a multidisciplinary team of 30 dental and medical practitioners to Uganda, providing basic care to some of the most impoverished communities there. In the last two-and-a-half years, five students from U of T’s Faculty of Dentistry have also joined the two-week trips. “It’s an amazing learning experience of the soul for the students,” says Barzilay. “It’s not technical. It is more what is inside.”

Iranian-born master’s student Elahe Behrooz has been on two expeditions to Uganda, where she feels she made a big impact. “In Toronto, there are plenty of dentists. If I’m not available a patient can see someone else,” she says.

“There, what touches me is that it’s me or no one. If I get one more extraction done I can make a big change. Even though it’s just two weeks, it’s the most impact I’ve had in my life.”

The dental team focuses on taking people out of pain, encourages them to find ways to keep their teeth and makes dentures to produce smiles. They also teach local “dental officers” how to give anesthesia, apply fluorides and make fillings and dentures. (The local officers have some dental skills but are not fully trained as dentists.)

The work teaches the U of T students gratitude and efficiency, according to Behrooz. The teams work out of makeshift clinics set up in classrooms and churches in remote villages lacking electricity and running water. They operate without many of the tools and diagnostic equipment they take for granted at home and often have only minutes to devise treatment plans that take hour-long sessions in Canada. They also learn innovative approaches to dentistry, such as how to construct dentures in a matter of hours. “Learning how to make single-­ day fabricated dentures opened up a new dentistry world to me,” says Behrooz.

On a given day, the dental team provides between 15 and 20 dentures, and performs up to 150 extractions. Behrooz says that one of the greatest challenges is making heart-­ wrenching decisions about whom to turn away at the end of every day, knowing that a tooth infection could spread to the head and neck and that a patient in danger of losing his teeth could die without a means of processing the hardy foods that are staples of the Ugandan diet.

Behrooz says the impact of the project has been profound: people can eat comfortably again, date, marry, sing, get jobs.

The students have also made strong friendships with the local dental officers and continue to plan treatments with them over the Internet after returning to Toronto. In the last two years, some of the team members have also begun to work in women’s shelters in Toronto, giving back smiles at no cost.

Their work in Uganda shapes their continuing practice back in Canada, and adds another dimension to their formation as dentists.

“The experience becomes a part of you,” says Behrooz.

“You leave a part of your heart in Uganda.”

– MANINI SHEKER

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Leading Edge

North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un (centre)

Q&A Finger on the Button Could a war of words lead to an actual war between the U.S. and North Korea?

Last summer, North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts say could strike Alaska or Hawaii, ratcheting up tensions in the region and beyond. Tina Park, a recent PhD graduate in history who focuses on Korean-Canadian relations, spoke with U of T News writer Geoff Vendeville about the looming crisis.

The war of words between North Korea and the U.S. heated up last summer and fall. Are we headed for an actual war?

Despite the bellicose and reckless rhetoric we’ve heard from

24 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, nobody can afford another war on the Korean peninsula. South Korea is the 11th-largest economy in the world. Seventy-six million people live on the Korean peninsula. Its small geographic size makes any surgical military option impossible. Most importantly, the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has made it absolutely clear that the United States cannot unilaterally engage in warfare on the Korean peninsula.

You seem confident that no one will act irrationally . . . The North Korean regime is actually very rational. For it to launch an attack would be suicidal. On the American side, Trump is not the only one who makes decisions. There’s also the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. There’s a whole system of checks and balances.

Have Koreans seen this level of belligerence before? There’s nothing new about tensions. What’s different today are three things. First, North Korea’s rapid advances in military and cyber-warfare capabilities. Second, President Trump.

The American position on North Korea is lacking clarity,

PHOTO: STR/GETTY IMAGES

Leading Edge

coherence and prudence, which contributes to a sense of instability. Lastly, Seoul and Washington differ on how to deal with North Korea. President Moon is pro-engagement and anti-war, and is willing to stand up against the U.S. to promote peace.

You were in Seoul recently. What’s the atmosphere there?

There’s no doubt that North Korea’s rapid progress with intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities and nuclear tests have raised a lot of concerns for the international community. But South Koreans are not easily stirred by provocations coming from the North. Most South Koreans don’t see North Koreans as the “enemy” – if anything, they are troubled by the state of malnutrition and human rights violations under the brutal dictatorship. President Moon’s recent announcement of an $8-million aid package to be used for food and medical supplies was widely supported by the South Korean public because they recognize that the humanitarian crisis in North Korea is the real problem.

What does the average North Korean know about their country’s missile program and sabre-rattling with the U.S.? North Koreans are brainwashed from birth about the perpetual threat posed by the United States. North Korea is a truly Orwellian society, where the state has absolute control of how the general population thinks and operates. The regime has justified its disproportionate spending on guns over bread as a survival tactic – that nuclear weapons provide the only deterrence against the American threat. The latest tweets from President Trump provide excellent sound bites for the Kim regime to justify further spending on its military.

of American influence in Northeast Asia. We should not view China as a monolithic entity – the foreign ministry, businesses and politicians all have different goals and interests when it comes to North Korea. Any solution will require a multilateral approach. The U.S. cannot force China to adopt a certain course of action. It needs to negotiate.

Where do you see a solution? Diplomacy is the only viable option. We need a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula to break the vicious cycle of provocations and condemnations and to guarantee a “no first-use” rule when it comes to nuclear weapons. At the end of the day, the Korean people must be in the driver’s seat when it comes to finding peace and stability. But we also need a coherent and long-term strategy from the international community to deal with security threats posed by North Korea.

What role, if any, should Canada play? There is a great need for an honest broker to mediate the different interests of regional players and to broker a final peace agreement between the North and the South. Canada has a wealth of experience negotiating peace. We should also be more engaged with the humanitarian crisis in North Korea.

There is a severe shortage of food and millions of people are dying from malnutrition. North Koreans live under severe oppression – many face torture and forced labour. If we are serious about our pledge of “never again,” Canada should really speak up and punch above its weight in terms of humanitarian aid.

WITH FILES FROM SCOTT ANDERSON

Trump wants China to impose economic sanctions on North Korea. Is this likely to happen? China enjoys unique leverage

Tina Park is a co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Responsibility to Protect, a non-partisan and non-profit research institute at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs that advocates for international human rights

over North Korea because at least three-quarters of North Korea’s official trade involves China. But China has not strictly enforced UN sanctions because of the fear of regime collapse, which could lead to an influx of refugees into China as well as potential reunification of the two Koreas and an expansion

LINGO

Antifa

When Donald Trump famously said last summer that there was “blame on both sides” regarding the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was referring to the neo-Nazis on the right and the “antifa,” or anti-fascists, on the left.

The antifa movement began in 1930s Europe but has been in

the news recently for clashing with white supremacists in the U.S., notably at an alt-right rally in Berkeley, California.

Antifa stands out from other liberal and left movements, says Alex Hanna, a professor of information at U of T Mississauga, because its members are willing to destroy the property of – and

inflict violence on – white nationalists. They can also be violent toward corporations and police, whom they see as complicit in perpetuating racism and white supremacy. The antifa ideology tends to be “anti-state and left libertarian,” says Hanna, favouring “small groups working together.”

– NOREEN AHMED-ULLAH

WINTER 2018 25

Leading Edge

U of T’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport offers three registered yoga classes and five drop-in yoga classes each week. They are open to all students and members

Yoga Is Good for You BUT JUST WHAT ARE THE HEALTH BENEFITS?

Studies have found that yoga can reduce stress and improve fitness. But researchers are still investigating many of the health benefits credited to the 5,000-year-old mental, physical and spiritual practice. Will the downward dog bring you peace of mind and a trim physique? We asked several professors in U of T’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education for their expert opinions.

Do those long and deep inhalations and exhalations help with hypertension and overall heart health? Yoga may offer some value in heart health and hypertension therapy but larger, more sophisticated studies are required to confirm the consistency and extent of benefit.

Do yoga twists bring fresh nutrients to the spine and flush out waste? Yoga’s cat-cow motions are especially good.

But poses that bend and twist the spine to extremes can result in relatively high stresses being developed in spinal ligaments and intervertebral discs.

Can hot yoga help you to lose weight?

Hot yoga raises your metabolic rate, but many forms of exercise do this better.

If you do experience any weight loss during a hot yoga session, it’s probably a result of fluid loss or profuse sweating.

Does yoga improve the mind-body connection? Research suggests that meditation can reduce brain activity that would otherwise interfere with motor performance. So, your body may be better prepared to succeed at many motor skills, including maintaining yoga postures, when your mind is in a meditative state.

Does yoga promote calmness and peace of mind? One needs to practice yoga in a comfortable non-judgmental space and the individual must be able to be mindful. Individuals who bring competitiveness to yoga may not achieve peace of mind.

Does yoga’s deep breathing better oxygenate the blood than short shallow breaths? Really shallow breathing is not good. But deep breathing is likely no better than normal breathing at transporting oxygen into the lungs.

Can yoga kickstart your sex drive? Yoga helps improve self-esteem and self-confidence, which are both important to instilling a sense of comfort being naked and even more adventurous with sex.

With commentary from Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education professors Tyson Beach, Jack Goodman, Ira Jacobs, Catherine Sabiston and Luc Tremblay. Model: Veronique Merritt, a visiting researcher from Columbia University

26 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

PHOTO: CHRIS THOMAIDIS

WHAT DID ALICIA BRING HOME FROM PARIS? A GLOBAL OUTLOOK ON ARCHIVES AND HERITAGE.

Legacy giving made it possible. In the summer of 2016, Alicia Dotiwalla (MI 2017) worked at UNESCO in Paris.

During her internship, she observed international archivists and experts apply their depth of knowledge to a vast range of research questions. This internship prepared her with hands-on skills, best practices and a global perspective for navigating diverse and complex research questions that enrich her work in the field.

Today, thanks to this experience made possible by donor support, Alicia works full-time as an Archivist.

You too can support future archivists like Alicia by including the Faculty of Information in your will.

To talk about legacy giving, contact: michelle.osborne@utoronto.ca or 416-978-3811. give.utoronto.ca

PLAN B THE POWER OF REINVENTION

Earlier this year, U of T nursing student Emma Taylor (a pseudonym) was seriously injured in a car crash. Taylor’s story, “With a Student in Crisis, a Faculty Rallies” (p. 30), highlights an unsettling truth: our lives can be upended in a moment. In this issue, we explore the idea of “Plan B” – of pursuing change, either by choice or because life demands it – and how knowledge and education can help us achieve the dreams we have, or chase new ones.

CONTENTS

With a Student in Crisis, a Faculty Rallies

Ghost Effects

50

Finding Comfort in Food

54

36

Make No Mistake

56

After the Shooting, a Search for Salvation

38

Turning Points: Dave Wilton

61

Turning Points: Lydia Pedersen

43

Mind Games

62

A New Life After Loss

44

There Is No Magic Formula When Quitting an Addiction

30

Turning Points: Celina Caesar-Chavannes

47

Are You Ready?

48

ILLUSTRATION BY REMIE GEOFFROI

PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

“I want other people who are facing challenges to feel OK that it takes a long time to heal – both inside and outside,” says Emma Taylor, pictured at U of T’s Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

30 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

WITH A STUDENT IN CRISIS, A FACULTY RALLIES

In an instant, Emma’s hopes of becoming a nurse were dashed.

Could she make the journey back?

As told to

Photography by

STACEY GIBSON

LORNE BRIDGMAN

In 2015, at the age of 29, Emma Taylor (a pseudonym) entered U of T’s bachelor of science in nursing program.

It is an intensive two-year degree: two to three days a week, students are in a hospital for up to 12-hour shifts, and two days a week, they’re in classes – many of which are highlevel, theoretical courses. Taylor had received an entrance scholarship, and was at the top of her class. She was in love with the program. She also held a job and was dealing with personal difficulties. One night, the sheer enormity of it all caught up with her. What follows is her account of her “rock bottom” accident, her journey to completing her nursing degree (with help from those around her) and her present-day challenges.

WINTER 2018

31

PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

ON MARCH 7, I HAD A TYPICALLY BUSY DAY. I went to classes, then to a health mentorship session, then to my part-time job at a hospital. I was using every bit of my emotional reserve to get through this program, which would be done in June. I could see the light. But at the same time, I was dealing with issues in my personal life: I’d had a bad breakup. A friend had just died of cancer. I was really being confronted with the darker, sadder side of life. After my hospital shift ended at 9 p.m., I went to a café to catch up on my studies.

I was extremely exhausted. I have no memory of getting in my car to go home.

I only remember waking up in the intensive care unit.

I had been in a car crash at a very high speed: I had hit a tree at 120 kilometres an hour. By the grace of God, no one else was in the accident. It was just me who got hurt. If I had hit a pedestrian, he or she would have been dead.

I had a traumatic brain injury; I had hit my head pretty hard. I broke my sternum, which is a very painful experience.

I broke many ribs and bruised my heart. There were pulmonary embolisms in my lungs. I was in rough shape.

I woke up on every pain medication, every sedative, under the sun. I was in a neck brace. I reached for my iPhone. I texted my professor. “I don’t think I’ll make it. I might miss class.”

I did not understand what had happened to me. It was a miracle I came through the accident.

ONE OF EMMA’S NURSING PROFESSORS, MAKI IWASE, OFFERS HER PERSPECTIVE ON EMMA’S STORY

Emma was in incredible pain and on high doses of analgesic opioids and yet she was so concerned about not being accountable as a nursing student. That’s how conscientious she is. It’s distressing for students who have to press the pause button on their studies. Emma could see the finish line, which made the situation that much more devastating.

AFTER TWO DAYS, I was transferred to the trauma unit for

three days. Then they set me free. You hear about this all the time. They move to push people out of the acute care setting as soon as they can. They were like, “See you in three months for a follow-up.”

Nurses and clinicians do what they can in a health-care system with finite resources, but the reality was that the care was not awesome. I left with all the wrong prescriptions.

I left in an enormous amount of pain. They did a CAT scan, but even though I’d suffered a concussion, they didn’t do an MRI. Both of my parents came down and lived with me.

We got really close, after everything. I’m so grateful for them.

I love them so much.

I was not confined to bed, but I was in the house because I was exhausted. I had about two to three hours of energy to do anything. The pain was keeping me up at night. I couldn’t walk because my ankle was injured. I was having a lot of psychological and emotional reactions to what had happened.

I would cry at the drop of a hat. It’s not uncommon to have a mood disorder as a result of a concussion. I thought of how vital I had been before this accident. I’d never had to worry about not being able to think, or sleep, or put on a shirt, or go dancing.

At the time of the accident, I was in a home-care course with Professor Maki Iwase. In this weird cosmic way, I was now living some of the drawbacks of what Maki talked about:

32 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

Illness is world-altering not just for yourself but for your family members. Emma is in the ICU, and her parents are faced with: “Is she going to make it? Is she going to be able to function or is she going to be on total care for the rest of her life?” They put their lives on hold to care for her. At one point or another, we will be either recipients or givers of care in the home. It affects all of us.

About how some really ill people get put back into their homes, and their homes become a hospital, essentially, and their loved ones are responsible for their care. I don’t know what the heck you would do if you didn’t have a mom who was a doctor like I do or if you didn’t have a home to go to.

I GAINED A DEPTH AND DIMENSION to what I’d been learning

at U of T, and this lived experience of being the patient changed how I nurse. I now really understand the gravity of injury and illness. I now deeply understand a patient’s confusion and fear. I now understand what it means to be vulnerable – when you need to go to the washroom and you call the nurse, and you’re made to wait. I think what makes me a better nurse is just that overall understanding – and people can feel if a nurse has that understanding. I could tell the moment the nurse walked in the room if I was going to have a good night or not because I was like, “Does this nurse give a shit or not?” You can tell.

We talked a great deal about advocacy in nursing in my classes, but I didn’t appreciate how important it really is. For instance, I needed a nurse who would’ve said, “I don’t think she should go home yet. Does she have a cardiology follow-up?

Does she have an orthopedic follow-up? Does she have any of these setups?” That wasn’t there at all.

When it comes to continuity of care from an acute setting to a home setting, a nurse might say, “Follow up with your family doctor.” I will say, “When you follow up with your

One course I teach is called Home and Health and we examine not just how home and health are closely tied, but how broader social, political and economic forces have a bearing on the services that clients have access to – how policy has profound everyday effects on people who are, for example, dying at home in palliative situations. And the politics and ethics of unequal distribution of services even within Toronto.

I was a home-care nurse, and when you go into people’s homes, you get a very real sense of socio-economic challenges and personal support systems. You just open the fridge to get a sense of the food insecurity and of who in their world is there to support them. Sometimes there’s no one.

WINTER 2018 33

PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

family doctor, ask her specifically about this, this and this.”

A family doctor doesn’t know exactly what happened in the hospital, and the reality is she might not truly appreciate and follow through with all aspects of a complex trauma case.

Really, it’s the patient who carries that continuity of care.

I will advocate for patients, and educate them so they receive a proper follow-up in the community.

WHEN I WAS READY TO RETURN to U of T in April, the level of support I received was shocking to me. The nursing faculty is so special. My program director, Maureen Barry, reached out to me. She asked, “What do you want? How can I help you?”

I said, “I want to graduate. I don’t want to lose this year.”

There was no, “Oh, well, I think you better just accept you’ve lost your year. I’m so sorry.” Instead, she gave me a step-bystep program of what I needed to do.

Also, one of the lights in my nursing career has been Maki.

She said, “I’m going to get you through this home-care course.

What I need you to do for me is write the final paper.” This was a very positive, challenging task and I love writing essays.

Maki sat with me while I hashed out my plan for the paper.

This helped, because it was still really hard for me to synthesize abstract, high-level ideas. Maki let me do it on a time frame that allowed me to do it right and in a way that didn’t exhaust me. I had a gradual re-entry back into everything.

At the same time, students from the program reached out on Facebook, they phoned, they sent emails, they showed up at the hospital and at my home. Their encouragement was so genuine and touching. I printed out all their messages.

When I have bad days, I go back and read them. I still draw so much strength from them.

Really, my job was to accept everyone’s help – and that was hard for me to do, because I’m so independent. A huge way that I grew was to learn to accept the help and to let people see that I need help.

THE MOST POWERFUL THING Maki did for me is invite me to

talk to my entire class about my experience. I felt ashamed of the car crash. I wasn’t resilient yet. I hadn’t graduated yet.

I was still down. She put all the other students around me and she just said, “Tell us what you want to tell us.” Everyone listened intently and they were so respectful.

I got to talk about how I lived the experience that Maki meant to acquaint us with this entire semester and I said, “I can’t tell you enough how right the professors are in terms of what they’re trying to get us to appreciate as clinicians about how confusing it is to be sick in your home. About how much responsibility is on patients who are ill-equipped to navigate their own illness or injury, and how much you can take your body for granted and how much pain can come unexpectedly.”

I remember how proud Maki was of me and how she was crying and how this validated what I was feeling. It was very

34 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

For many students who are taking the course, they are learning about the troubles within the health-care system, how acute care and community care are siloed – and how there is very little funding in community care. They are also learning how care encompasses not just the medical side of things, but also the social side. People in home care need help with basics such as taking a shower, doing laundry and getting groceries.

The faculty really rallied around Emma.

I worked with the director, Maureen Barry. I asked her, “How are we going to get Emma through in a way that safeguards her health and preserves her hope?” At this point, her hopes are dashed and she’s mired in pain. She couldn’t even look at her screen for more than an hour or two; she had strict guidelines to follow from the concussion clinic.

It was a gradual transition. I worked closely with Emma in terms of modifying the remaining assignments – not to compromise on the academic integrity but to figure out how she might bring her own lived experiences to bear alongside the content.

Learning About Home Care While Living It As classes ended, Prof. Maki Iwase invited Emma to share insights from her experience with her classmates

On the last day of class, I like to do a potluck party. At it, students recap their clinical observations: What was significant for them?

What memory can they carry forward in their nursing career that will inform the care that they provide?

I thought Emma had so much to share with her peers, who were witness to her struggles.

So I asked her to give a speech. It took courage: It’s living the trauma all over again and required her to show her vulnerability.

There were moments when Emma had to stop talking because it was too emotional for her, and because she couldn’t sit in the chair for too long because she had so much pain in her ribs. She was on high doses of pain medication but she still came and she shared her story. It was very moving.

Not only did she share her own lived experience of that transition from acute care to home care, but she told her narrative from a nursing student’s perspective. It also gave her peers a chance to ask difficult questions such as, “What’s it like for you now? What was the most challenging thing for you? What surprised you?” They gave

her very affirming support: recognizing her strength, capacity and determination.

The students who go through this two-year program develop a bond. They’re incredibly supportive of one another – while they’re learning to take care of patients, they’re learning to take care of themselves and each other, too.

Students can intellectualize the content of the home-care course, but Emma brought it to life, made it very close and real. Her experience underscores how all our lives’ trajectories can change without a moment’s notice and how none of us are immune to falling ill or being in an accident. When it does happen, everyone is vulnerable. We take our health for granted.

The reality of accidents or a threat to health is that it is not something that happens and then it’s gone. Emma’s story extended students’ understanding of their own clinical work and spoke to that essential concern, “What do we want when we’re vulnerable and ill? What matters?”

– MAKI IWASE, AS TOLD TO STACEY GIBSON

emotional and powerful and I felt she was, in her way, holding my hand and bringing me back to the circle.

I GRADUATED on November 7th, with honours. I felt incredibly

proud and grateful. I walked the stage with my classmates who had helped me recover. My parents were in the audience.

Maki and Maureen were on the dais, and I could see a little sparkle in their eyes when I walked. I now have a job in the field of acute-care mental health.

I still have pain; it’s always there in my chest. My ankle hurts, and I wear a brace to work every day. But overall, I am left with a huge sense of gratitude for where I am. The accident was my rock bottom; I was so stressed out and something had to give. I needed more support, and maybe the accident was the way that I needed to learn to ask for support.

But I also have to remind myself that it is OK to be where I’m at. Things can get trivialized very easily by those around us – whether it be a breakup or accident or failing a course.

And we’re taught not to look at the bad stuff; get over it and rise above. That starts to become a pressure of its own. People validating my struggles is really important. You don’t get to bounce back strong without first going through horrible challenges. I’m still healing, for sure. I want other people who are facing challenges to feel ok that it takes a long time to heal – both inside and outside.

When I was recovering, I initially tried to get back to the spot of where, and how, I was before. That place is gone.

But I’m arriving at a new place.

They’re so lucky to have her. She could go anywhere, but I’m so glad she’s working with people who are incredibly vulnerable and much of their illness is invisible and who, historically, have had such challenging barriers to getting access to care.

I hope for Emma’s complete recovery, and I want her to embrace life and living.

Beyond work, she has so much to give and receive in equal measure. The hardships have really made her into an exquisite nurse. She was incredibly empathetic before, but now it comes from a visceral place. That’s profoundly powerful. Maybe in the future, she will find herself at the table where she can bring policymakers closer to the bedside in the home and will be a leading advocate for patients.

WINTER 2018 35

PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

THERE IS NO MAGIC FORMULA WHEN QUITTING AN ADDICTION By 28, I’d been arrested, convicted and kicked out of grad school.

But it took me another two years to end my love affair with drugs

Written by

MARC LEWIS

36 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

TRYING TO DESCRIBE what it’s like to quit drugs to someone never before addicted is a bit like trying to describe a breakup to someone who’s never been in love. Much like romantic love, addiction almost always has two chapters: falling in, and then, when it’s no longer tolerable, clawing your way out.

The most prominent model of addiction in North America frames it as a disease – a brain disease. But I never saw addiction as a disease. Not now, after studying it for eight years as a scientist, and not 40 years ago when I was living it. Back then, I could easily see how destructive addiction was. I knew how miserable it made me, but I never thought that I was ill.

Like racism, domestic violence, jihadism and certainly romantic love, I’ve come to understand addiction as a complex psychosocial process (which of course involves the brain).

It should not be shelved under a simplistic label – especially one that bequeaths a sense of powerlessness. To me, addiction is best seen as a habit of thinking and acting, entrenched (psychologically and neurally) through repetition, and driven by powerful feelings of attraction and loss.

I hated being an addict. If there’d been a pill to cure it, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. But taking pills was the problem, not the solution. I started with heroin at age 17 while going to school in Berkeley, California. I knew that heroin was a supremely bad idea, but I wanted to break some rules and soothe myself at the same time. I vaguely understood that my years at a militaristic boarding school had sown the seeds of a depression that fuelled my addiction.

Now I know the research showing that child and adolescent trauma indeed foreshadow addiction. At 20, my greatest joy was an afternoon by the ocean tripping on LSD. By age 24, heroin had become my drug of choice. By 26, I was living in Toronto, applying to grad school in psychology, and injecting or swallowing pharmaceutical opiates up to several times a day. I would steal morphine and its chemical cousins from the lab where I worked, from doctors’ offices and pharmacies, or I’d write my own prescriptions. By 28, I’d been arrested, convicted and kicked out of graduate school. I’d lost a girlfriend I deeply loved, and my other friendships were shedding like dry skin. By 29, I was injecting combinations of drugs that still make me shudder.

Then, at age 30, I quit.

It wasn’t the first time I’d tried. More like the 257th. I’d written a stack of journals full of self-analysis, self-admonishment and pep talks, and sworn to everyone I knew that this was it.

I’d thrown away my stash regularly as a symbolic gesture, and tried to replace drugs with booze, sex and music. I’d had regular sessions with an addiction counsellor (as part of a probation order) and then found three psychotherapists on my own. I was convicted and put on probation a second time. I lost at least three jobs because I came to work high or acted irresponsibly. I even (finally) left a marriage that was

just plain wrong – for both of us. But none of these things stopped me. Which is to say, they might have stopped me for a few days, a week, a month, even several months.

But then I’d go back.

Until I didn’t. Until I got really, really sick of being an addict.

I didn’t know for sure that it was working the time it worked – not until a few weeks went by and the thought of going back to drugs was not only less and less appealing but also increasingly repellent. Over several months, thoughts about drugs became boring. In a year, I found it hard to remember exactly what the attraction had been.

By that time I was back in graduate school and had lots to keep me busy.

What was my magic formula? I told myself that I not only couldn’t do drugs anymore but didn’t want to do drugs anymore. I reminded myself over and over that I hated drugs and the way they’d appropriated my life. I wrote the word “No” on a piece of paper, tacked it to the wall above my staircase and read it 20 or 30 times a day. I meditated a bit and did tai chi in the park at night.

But my magic formula isn’t the point. Of the thousands of former addicts I’ve talked with, via email, Skype, in person or on my blog, no two of them quit in exactly the same way.

For some, psychotherapy was key. For others it was an overdose scare. For still others a commitment to a loved one; a practice, such as meditation or exercise; or jail time (probably the least helpful). The point is that, despite these variations, most addicts do quit – everything from alcohol to porn to gambling to heroin – and the majority of them quit without professional help or intervention. (Though some addicts do need professional help, and that help should always be made available and tailored to individual needs.)

Most addicts quit when they’re ready. When they’ve had enough. When they want, more than anything else, to keep growing. (It’s called “aging” or “maturing” out of addiction.)

In fact, I see quitting as a developmental process. I see it as the second half of the developmental journey that got them into addiction in the first place.

I was stubborn. Quitting came hard for me and took a long time to stick. For some people it’s harder. For many, it’s easier. But if there’s any lesson to be learned from my own struggle, it’s that addiction is complicated, blending psychological, social and biological factors along a timeline that’s both highly individual and ultimately universal. Nobody likes being an addict. Given the opportunity, and the time to make it work, most of us do what we have to do to stop.

Marc Lewis (PhD 1989) is a U of T professor emeritus in developmental psychology. He is the author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain (2011), which he wrote with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, and The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease (2015).

DO YOU HAVE A STORY ABOUT OVERCOMING AN ADDICTION THAT YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE? WRITE US AT UOFT.MAGAZINE@UTORONTO.CA

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AFTER THE SHOOTING, A SEARCH FOR SALVATION

U of T sociology professor Jooyoung Lee spent time with 40 people who had been shot – in some cases, multiple times – to find out how they coped and to record how their lives had changed. Their stories are harrowing and instructive. This is just one

Written by

Illustration by

JOOYOUNG LEE

SÉBASTIEN THIBAULT

PAUL WAS A LINE COOK at a sports bar when his roommate and landlord, Cordell, shot him.

Paul had been bad at managing his money, and tensions between the two reached a boiling point when he fell behind on four months of rent.

One morning, Cordell stormed into their shared apartment with what Paul thought was a BB gun. Cordell fired, and the first bullet nicked Paul’s scalp and ricocheted off his index finger. A second round entered and exited the side of Paul’s chest. The third round ripped through his shoulder and came out of his armpit. Paul collapsed.

Paul “played dead” for the next half hour, silently watching Cordell clean up the crime scene. He watched Cordell crawl around on hands and knees collecting bullet casings; and in the most chilling moment, Paul remembers Cordell staring into his eyes and kicking his feet to check if he was still alive.

At one point, Paul tried to escape, screaming for help out of a rear door that led into an alleyway. Cordell intercepted him and dragged him back into the kitchen. He then placed the muzzle of his gun against Paul’s face and fired a fourth round. This bullet shattered Paul’s jaw and ripped through his neck and chest, lodging in a band of muscle just beneath his collarbone.

Cordell then left Paul alone. Paul was slipping in and out of consciousness. To stay alert, he focused on the sound of water running through old pipes in the ceiling. With a sudden surge of adrenalin, he made a clumsy sprint to the front door. Cordell heard him and came running down the stairs with his gun drawn. Paul closed his eyes, expecting to get shot again. But, the gun jammed and Paul managed to escape.

Minutes later, a passerby discovered him lying at the side of the road in a pool of his own blood.

P

aul’s story haunted me. The details of Cordell’s executionstyle shooting were much different than the accounts I got from other gunshot victims in the outpatient trauma clinic at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the victims I met had been shot during stickups, drive-by shootings and other street altercations. Paul’s shooting was different. It was cold and calculated and occurred in his home – a place where he was supposed to be safe. This was traumatic for Paul, who suffered from terrifying flashbacks.

I met Paul two weeks after he’d been shot. I’d walked into a hospital room, where he was slumped over an exam table.

He motioned for me to check out his hand. His pinky and ring fingers were coiled, like an eagle’s claw. “Does it hurt?”

I asked. Paul’s eyes widened, “Does it hurt?! Every morning I wake up, this shit hurts!”

Later that day, Paul asked his doctor for a refill of Percocet.

Paul’s doctor listened to his story, but denied the request, saying, “Percocet is not a long-term pain option. You can try taking Motrin or Extra Strength Tylenol. They should help

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A serious injury presents particular problems for working poor victims such as Paul who depend on an able body for their livelihood you.” Paul protested, but to no avail. We sat in silence after his doctor left. Paul let out a deep sigh, “Motrin?! Percs barely do the trick!”

Paul would have liked physical rehabilitation, but he did not have health insurance and could not pay for it out of pocket. In the meantime, Percocet helped him regain some semblance of his former life. Without it, pain invaded his body and disrupted his sleep. As we left the clinic, I asked Paul what he was planning to do. He shrugged, “I know some people who got Percs. You can get everything on the street.”

With Percocet to ease his pain, Paul was initially able to keep his job as a line cook. He managed with the help of other kitchen staff for a week, but became a liability during busy nights. With his permanently clenched left hand, he could still hold the fryer, but he couldn’t do basic things like open jars or lift boxes. His friends on staff picked up the slack for as long as they could, but once service started slowing down considerably, Paul was let go.

P

aul was one of nine gunshot victims in Philadelphia I interacted with weekly for almost two years beginning in January 2010 as part of an ethnographic study I was conducting. I use the term “victim” throughout because this is how participants referred to themselves. Thirty-eight of the 40 participants identified as black or African-American.

One participant was white, and one identified as Latin American. Their ages ranged from 18 to 60; the median age was 24. All but three of the participants were men.

I spent time with Paul at homeless shelters; I attended his meetings with social workers; I also spent time with him in his old neighbourhood, which was located next to one of Philadelphia’s largest and most racially segregated housing projects. By the time he reached adulthood, Paul had witnessed the shooting murders of 11 close friends, family members and acquaintances. Although he had grown up immersed in street culture, Paul was not dealing drugs when he got shot. He had left this life behind and often remarked

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that he did not miss the stress and anxiety that came with drug dealing.

After the shooting, Paul spent most of his days trying to control the sharp and throbbing pains in his body. This is a dilemma faced by thousands of gunshot victims who are wounded each year in the U.S. Most of these victims do not have health insurance or are under-insured when they get shot. Indeed, while fatal shootings dominate news coverage, most people do not die from shootings. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one in five shootings are fatal.

Under American law, all gunshot victims are entitled to emergency and followup care when they arrive wounded in hospitals. But once they are deemed healed by physicians, they return to their home communities, where victims such as Paul continue to struggle with injuries, chronic pain and health problems that diminish their quality of life.

Getting shot is often the beginning of a downward spiral in a person’s health. Sudden and unanticipated disability can jolt them out of the labour market – sometimes indefinitely.

A serious injury presents particular problems for working poor victims such as Paul who depend on an able body for their livelihood.

Social scientists often use a term called “structural violence” to explain why young black men such as Paul are the most at-risk group for fatal gun violence in the United States. Between 2000 and 2015, overall rates of gun homicide have decreased in the U.S. But gun homicide rates per 100,000 people are still more than eight times higher for African Americans than for whites. And while improved surgical techniques and other advances in trauma care have helped reduce gunshot mortality rates, surviving victims face a lifetime of pain and disability. Even their interactions with health-care providers can be problematic. Physicians and nurses often develop a skeptical disposition toward gunshot victims because they believe that victims must have been doing something illicit or risky to get shot.

The structural violence perspective helps us appreciate larger racial-ethnic and class disparities in exposure to gun violence, but it also raises additional questions about how people collectively respond to adverse life events. How do gunshot victims make sense of and try to manage their injuries? What survival strategies do they employ? And how do these strategies affect their road to recovery?

I

noticed one day that Paul was clutching a black rosary dangling around his neck. He kissed it and peered up at the sky and said, “I always got this with me now.” He explained that an elderly woman at his church had given it to him. It became something like a talisman; Paul felt it would keep him safe from future harm. “God got my back,” he said. The elders in the church had also organized a

What Does an Ethnographer Do?

Professor Jooyoung Lee

In January 2010, Jooyoung Lee began conducting interviews at a hospital in Philadelphia with patients who had been shot. Lee, an ethnographer, was interested in learning more about how a shooting injury affected people long after they returned home from the hospital. Would they make a full recovery? Whom would they draw on for support? How would their life have to change? During the interviews, Lee asked the shooting victims if they’d be willing to hang out with him regularly as they went about their day-today activities.

Ethnographers are like embedded journalists. They spend hundreds – or even thousands – of hours with their participants, interacting with them, watching and recording. Their goal, says Lee, is to get “an intimate and authentic representation of the person’s life.” One thing ethnographers have learned, he notes, is that there are big differences between what people say about their life and how they actually live.

clothing drive for him when he came out of the hospital.

“They knew I was homeless and didn’t have nothing, so they took donations.”

Paul told me that he had grown up going to church, but stopped after his mom passed away. Getting shot and coming close to death had inspired him to go back.

Paul started visiting a local Baptist church two weeks after getting out of the hospital and immediately bonded with one of the senior pastors. The pair met every couple of weeks for private prayers and Bible study. At first, the pastor had sometimes prayed with Paul after the sermon. Then, Paul started visiting with the pastor during the week. “Sometimes I just go in and we shoot the shit, just like we doing now,” he said. Other times, they would sit quietly and pray together.

“What do you talk about?” I asked. Paul shrugged, “Pretty much everything. I like Pastor Mike because he told me that this ain’t the end. I survived! He tells me that God has a plan.

This is just the beginning.”

All of this confirmed Paul’s wishes to get baptized. “At the end of the day, I wanna be straight with my creator,” he said.

“Do you think about those things more now?” I asked. Paul laughed, “Yeah, most definitely. I realize I might be going back to that bright light and I wanna be straight. I don’t want nothing to keep me from heaven.”

Many social and behavioural scientists are skeptical of religious institutions and take an agnostic view of spiritual matters and the afterlife. But, as Paul’s story shows, there are other ways that we might think about religious institutions, particularly in the lives of people who survive traumatic

In the end, Lee observed nine of the 40 people he interviewed at the hospital.

On some days, Lee accompanied them for a few hours as they did errands. On others, he spent most of the day with them – or sometimes an evening in a social context.

“It wasn’t really structured. It was when I had time, when they had something interesting going on or when they wanted me to come over,” he says.

Lee’s field study ended in late 2011, and he’s now writing a book about gunshot victims, called Ricochet. The title, he says, alludes to the book’s central finding: that a gunshot injury causes difficulties that reverberate through a victim’s life.

– SCOTT ANDERSON

Religious institutions provide people with a safe space to connect with other worshippers who openly empathize and pray for them violence. On the one hand, religious institutions are important centres of community life. They provide much more than just moral and spiritual guidance. They are hubs that connect people – powerful institutional buffers against social isolation. These are especially important functions in communities that have been transformed by poverty and violence.

Religious institutions play a special role in the lives of gunshot victims, whose injuries and lingering mental health issues disrupt their social and working lives. Near-death experiences can cut people off from the outside world. It can make them retreat into the confines of their home or rob them of the very relationships that help them cope with trauma. Religious institutions provide people with a safe space to connect with other worshippers who openly empathize

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and pray for them. This is a powerful source of social and emotional support.

Religious institutions also help victims rebuild their lives.

Members of his congregation came to Paul’s aid when he needed clothing, a place to stay and a ride to and from appointments. These are some of the less visible ways that religious institutions support victims such as Paul, who don’t have family to help them.

Paul’s story also shows that spirituality isn’t just a cognitive salve that helps a person grapple with the prospect of their own mortality. It is a broader orientation to crisis management and it helps a person cope with the unpredictability of traumatic injury. Time and again, researchers have shown that strong spiritual beliefs help inspire hope and lead people to feel a greater sense of control of their lives. Spirituality has also been shown to help people make meaning out of their suffering. A person who believes that adversity is natural feels less daunted by the tasks that lie ahead of them in rebuilding their lives.

Paul leaned on the support of people such as the church elders and Pastor Mike. They helped him see the shooting as an important – even integral – part of a divine plan for his spiritual growth and salvation. These interactions changed Paul’s view of his near-death experience. What felt overwhelming and crushing in some moments would become more manageable and part of his traumatic rebirth. In fact, he would talk about getting shot and almost dying in thankful terms, saying that this experience would ultimately save his life.

Of course, people say this when they’re trying to maintain a positive and upbeat attitude about a dreadful scenario.

But positive thinking is, in its own way, a source of resiliency.

It helps shield victims from depression and crippling thoughts, and it inspires them to go out and seek more help.

Spirituality helps people make meaning out of their suffering. A person who believes that adversity is natural feels less daunted by the tasks that lie ahead of them in rebuilding their lives shirt. It still had the ironed creases in it from the dry cleaners.

“I can’t wait to see Pastor Mike. It’s been too long,” he said, putting on the jacket to his two-piece suit. I sat down on a couch and watched Paul get ready for his big day. He was excited and nervous, but seemed hopeful about what the future might bring.

I

n the summer of 2011, Paul testified against Cordell in his criminal case. Paul’s testimony helped the prosecution convict Cordell on attempted murder and gun charges.

Cordell was sentenced to 14 years in a state prison. I was surprised to find Paul in a sombre mood after the hearing.

I naively thought he would feel a sense of closure. “So do you feel like you can move on?” I asked. Paul shook his head.

“No. I mean, look at my hand. This shit is never gonna be right.” I tried to console Paul, but didn’t know how to cheer him up. His hand looked worse than the first day we’d met, more than a year earlier. Many of his fingers were coiled up and swollen. He complained about throbbing pains in his hands and said that many of his fingers were going completely numb.

Later that summer, Paul got baptized. We met up at his cousin’s house. “What do you think?” he asked, as he answered the front door. Paul was wearing his best dress

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This article is adapted from Ricochet, a forthcoming book by U of T sociology professor Jooyoung Lee.

LYDIA PEDERSEN TURNING POINTS

AS TOLD TO SHARON ASCHAIEK ACTIVITIES

EDUCATION

Workshop clinician for hymn writing

Bachelor of Arts, Psychology, McGill University

1990–PRESENT

The basis for my doctoral thesis at U of T was a workshop for people to write their own hymns, and in the process discover more about their spirituality. I loved the project and hope to continue working in this field.

1968

1976

MEd, Special Education, McGill University 1987

Bachelor of Music, University of Toronto 2017

Doctor of Ministry, University of Toronto

Having worked as a summer camp counsellor, I knew I had an affinity for kids. While giving piano lessons, I discovered I also had a gift for teaching. These two passions decided my future career path.

There was one little girl at the McKay Centre who had been raised in a hospital and who didn’t ever talk. But when I played piano, she warmed up. Her first words to me when she did start to speak were “You little devil, you!” – the sweetest words I’d ever heard. At the end of the year, this little girl was singing a solo in the school concert. That’s the magic of music.

1972–75

Since I was a mature student with experience, U of T’s Faculty of Music let me design my own program. I learned a lot from Prof. David Fallis, who conducted the early music choir. I’m not really a singer, but I am musical. I sing with more intelligence than talent.

1975–76

Music in the church is not just for pleasure.

It's a vehicle for carrying meaning – for giving the words wings. I had three wonderfully happy decades of creative music-making, in my congregation and the wider United Church.

SELECTED WORK EXPERIENCE

I WAS LUCKY TO KNOW EARLY ON WHERE MY GIFTS LAY – AND STUBBORN ENOUGH TO PURSUE MY DREAMS

I applied to McGill’s medical school and was accepted. But dealing with lab machines and memorizing chemical formulas didn’t interest me, so I left. My parents were deeply disappointed, but I knew it wouldn’t work for me.

Music teacher, Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal Classroom teacher, McKay Centre for Deaf and Crippled Children 1991–2000

Music specialist, Toronto French School

I chose to pursue a doctor of ministry degree, just for fun. Computers proved to be my biggest challenge. But I loved the subject and the chance to learn again. I graduated at age 70.

Now I’m taking harp lessons!

1979–2009

Director of Music, Royal York Road United Church, Toronto

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“Never in a million years did I think I would become a rabbi,” says Rena Arshinoff (MHSc 1983), who worked for many years as a medical researcher

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A NEW LIFE AFTER LOSS Over more than two decades, Rena Arshinoff built a successful career in medical science.

Then she felt a spiritual call

Written by

Photography by

CYNTHIA MACDONALD

LORNE BRIDGMAN

RENA ARSHINOFF WAS SITTING in a hospital cafeteria one day,

taking a break from her work as a medical researcher. The institution’s chaplain, a Baptist minister she knew, approached her table and asked: “What are you reading?”

Arshinoff (MHSc 1983) obliged her with the title: A Woman’s Journey to God. The chaplain’s response was unusual. She didn’t see this book as idle reading for Arshinoff, but as a step toward something bigger. “You’re going to be a rabbi,” she said.

Arshinoff was intrigued – especially since others, too, were suggesting that she look into this radically different career.

Recently, she’d been leading services at her local synagogue and immersing herself in religious life. But at almost 50, the nurse-turned-epidemiologist could already look back on not one but two full careers. Could she really embark on a third?

“Never in a million years did I think I would become a rabbi,” she says now, sitting in her office at Toronto’s Baycrest Health Sciences, a seniors’ hospital, residence and research centre where she herself is now chaplain. “I was accustomed to science, and looking for statistical significance in the data.

To me, if there wasn’t proof, how do we know?”

But the late 1990s had been a challenging time for Arshinoff; her sister Arlene (known as Cookie) died in 1997, followed by her father three years later. The empirical proof she regularly hunted down at work could offer certainty, but not comfort.

Arshinoff’s journey took shape as she stopped at her synagogue every day on her way to work to commemorate her father’s life. Jewish mourning is long and methodical, parcelled out into periods of time: seven days of intense grieving during shiva, then 30 days of shloshim, followed by – in the case of a deceased parent – a year in which the Kaddish, or Hebrew mourner’s prayer, is recited daily.

With each passing day, as she did the prayers, the Hebrew language became more familiar to her. She began to wear a kippah (skullcap) and prayer shawl, and decided to have a bat mitzvah, something that had not been readily available to girls in 1960s Montreal.

After the year of formal mourning was over, “I thought I’d just go back to being Rena the Epidemiologist,” she says. “But that didn’t work.” Her newfound religious life was becoming more and more meaningful.

Arshinoff’s losses, while painful, had revealed to her the power of spirituality. “There is a profound sense of community in Judaism,” she says. “We do a lot of public mourning in community, and that involves supporting each other.”

After she began leading services, the comments began.

You would be such a great rabbi, said one friend. Then another. And another. One friend told her three times. “You know,” Arshinoff responded, “one day I’m not going to laugh at that joke anymore.” Her friend said she wasn’t joking.

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Grief isn’t linear. We can find ourselves on an emotional roller-coaster and sometimes it doesn’t take much to start grieving again And so it was that Arshinoff embarked on the long, arduous path toward ordination. This involved five years of study in Israel and Cincinnati, psychological testing, and a lengthy period living apart from her husband and three children (two of whom had already left home themselves). She trained for a further year as a chaplain, and was ordained as a rabbi in 2008.

Today Arshinoff has returned to hospital life – but in a spiritual, instead of scientific, capacity. “Because I had a health-care background, it made sense,” she says. Her experience of mourning inspired her to specialize in grief counselling. She is currently completing a PhD in palliative care at Lancaster University in England, and works as an instructor in U of T’s bereavement education program – a joint venture between OISE and the Canadian Centre for Bereavement Education and Grief Counselling.

Undoubtedly, this is emotionally difficult work, but Arshinoff never doubts her chosen path. “It’s not easy to bear witness to another person’s suffering,” she says. “But I am so privileged to work with people as they experience the healing. To be able to offer them opportunities that help them work through their grief is just so rewarding.”

“One woman,” she says, “came to see me for two-and-a-half years after her mother died. She thought she’d never have a time where she wasn’t in pain every moment.” At length, however, “when she thought of her mother, she didn’t have the pain she used to have. She now feels joy, warmth, love and gratitude for the relationship she had.” Judaism, Arshinoff explains, recommends that grieving not be extended indefinitely; the timelines for prayers build structure into the process and provide guidance through ritual.

Seeing grief as a job – terms such as “grief work,” or “tasks of mourning” are common in the field – is thought to be therapeutic, both inside and outside the faith.

“And at the same time, grief isn’t linear,” Arshinoff admits.

“We can find ourselves on an emotional roller-coaster and sometimes it doesn’t take much to start grieving again.

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It could be a song on the radio, or something else.” Her own “something else” moment came in a grocery store when she was shopping for grapes, and caught the scent of her sister’s Clinique perfume on another shopper.

Such moments can be terribly sad, but they help Arshinoff identify with the people she counsels. These include children – she leads support groups as a volunteer with Bereaved Families of Ontario – as well as the seniors at Baycrest.

In the past year, she has also started working with patients with spinal cord injuries at Toronto’s Lyndhurst Centre.

“These patients are dealing with huge changes in their lives; they’re learning how to live a new kind of life,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll sit with family members, and ask how they’re managing.”

If it all seems a long way from the number-crunching and data analysis of her previous life, in some ways it isn’t. In the early years of Arshinoff’s epidemiology career, she worked as an AIDS researcher, neutralizing tragedy as best she could using reason and science. The book she was reading that day in the cafeteria – A Woman’s Journey to God – was actually written by a microbiologist who, says Arshinoff, “was tired of knowing people by their cells in petri dishes. She wanted to know who they really were.”

Last August, Arshinoff was appointed as an adjunct lecturer at U of T in the department of family and community medicine’s palliative care division. She hopes to teach students about health care’s qualitative aspects, rather than the quantitative metrics that dominated her past. “In my work now, I don’t look at statistics or p-values, I look at feelings.

And feelings are not easily measured, or rational. Coming from science, I always thought I was a rational person.

But I started to see that some components of life are more nebulous: They just require reflection – and acceptance.”

Cynthia Macdonald (BA 1986 St. Michael’s) is a Toronto journalist.

CELINA CAESARCHAVANNES TURNING POINTS

AS TOLD TO SCOT T ANDERSON ARTICLES

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

“ I’m An MP And I’m Among Those Who Struggle with Depression,” Huffington Post People were very appreciative that I shared my story. I didn’t expect to receive so many calls and emails.

Advocacy started to build, and our government committed $5 billion to mental health, especially for young people.

EDUCATION

1998

Bachelor of Science, Human Biology, University of Toronto 2005

MBA, Health Care Management, University of Phoenix 2015

Executive MBA, Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto SELECTED WORK EXPERIENCE

2000 TO 2002

Research Assistant, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care 2002–2003

Research Assistant, Rotman Research Institute 2003–2004

Clinical Research Co-ordinator, University of Toronto

ONE THING I’VE LEARNED IS THAT IT’S OK TO MAKE MISTAKES

2005–2015

President, ReSolve Research Solutions

It took me six years to finish a three-year degree. I graduated with a 1.58 grade point average. I felt terrible about the outlook for my life. But one thing I've learned is that it’s OK to make mistakes.

I’d been working as a forklift operator and really needed a new job. Baycrest was looking for someone with a psychology degree and a stats background. I didn’t have either, but I told them I had passion and drive – and that you can’t teach those! They hired me.

When the clinical research project I was working on at U of T ended, I asked for a reference letter to help me get into medical school. My supervisor suggested I consider business instead. I’d spent my whole life wanting to go to med school, but he saw something in me I hadn’t seen myself.

I turned 40 in 2014 and may have been having a mini-midlife crisis. My company, ReSolve Research, was starting to see real success and I considered taking it international. I thought a year at the Rotman School would help me decide. There was a politics component to one of the courses and I thought, “Maybe this is something I could do.” There were 19 women in the course, and we went out to dinner one night.

I put it out there – entering politics – and by the end of the night they were like, “We’ll run your campaign!” Two months later, I joined the Liberal Party.

I’m passionate about mental health and equity.

Recently, I gave a speech in the House of Commons in which I talked about hairstyles and body shaming of women. It went viral. A 72-year-­ old, self-described white, balding male emailed me to say how powerful he found what I’d said.

It speaks to the fact that we all deserve to claim our space – no matter what we look like.

OCTOBER 2015–PRESENT

Member of Parliament, Government of Canada

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ARE YOU READY?

It’s easy to say “be prepared.” Scouts learn it. Even Scar in The Lion King sang it. So why do business executives so often avoid it?

Written by

Illustration by

JOSHUA GANS

YAREK WASZUL

LAST SUMMER, EQUIFAX WAS HACKED. The consumer credit agency lost control of data that included the social security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and other personal information of more than 140 million people in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more in Canada and the U.K. If you were interested in stealing someone’s identity, this is precisely the information you’d want. With this one breach, Equifax, whose very reason for being is to protect consumers against fraud, turned from a business creating value to one that had destroyed it.

Companies get hacked all the time. And most large organizations take measures to protect their data. The sheer number of records that were stolen from Equifax suggests that the company may have been lax about data security. But no system is foolproof. Breaches will occur, and the key is knowing what to do afterward.

Rotman faculty members who study business strategy recently published Survive and Thrive, which explains how the best companies handle existential risks to their businesses.

In the book, we caution against the “ostrich effect” – ignoring threats and hoping they don’t occur on your watch. But we also look at situations in which firms have successfully

managed threats. And one of the best techniques is what we call “structured anticipation.”

There are two key points to be made. First, companies should always have a Plan B. They should work through scenarios – in the case of Equifax, a breach of security and loss of information control – and ensure that they’ll learn about these incidents in a timely manner. At the same time, they should have a process for when such incidents arise, and ensure that employees are aware of it. Every airline pilot has a manual to cover every imagined contingency. The same is needed for organizations – especially with regard to their greatest risks. For Equifax this would have meant appointing the right person to manage the crisis, establishing a clear line of reporting between this person and senior management, and relying on a set of procedures for communicating to customers about the breach.

We know now that Equifax – if it had planned for this at all – had not put a set of procedures in place. For a start, it waited more than two months to inform customers of the breach.

While it’s probably not wise to go public immediately (false alarms could be just as bad), Equifax seemed to drag its feet.

When the company finally did announce the problem, it set up a completely separate website for consumers to re-enter their personal information before they could gain access to remedial action. The website was designed so poorly that it could have been mistaken for one of the fake sites that were set up by spammers hoping to capitalize on the breach.

Equifax’s own Twitter account even directed users to one of the fake sites! Clearly, the company had not thought this through.

The second important point is for companies to foster a culture that encourages dissent. If an IT person within Equifax knew of a vulnerability, it appears he or she didn’t bring this to the attention of the C-Suite. Indeed, the delay may have arisen precisely because no one wanted to be the messenger with bad news. That suggests a culture that punishes messengers – something that makes a disaster such as Equifax’s all the more likely.

As a rule, managers get into trouble when they avoid managing. Managers who are averse to the consequences of a backlash will often look for solutions that primarily insulate themselves from blame. By contrast, the best managers see the world – and their own systems – as imperfect, and they establish protocols so that they and others can manage fires as soon as they arise. Whatever else Equifax may have done, one thing they did not do is manage the crisis. When Plan A failed, they had no contingency. Not surprisingly, the outcome turned out to be “early retirement.”

Joshua S. Gans is a professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management and co-editor of Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business.

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To address the “replication crisis,” Michael Inzlicht, a U of T professor of social psychology, shown here at his UTSC lab, is among researchers calling for greater openness and transparency about how experiments are conducted

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GHOST EFFECTS

Social psychologist Michael Inzlicht launched his academic career on the study of “ego depletion.”

His research suggested it was real.

Then came doubts

Written by

Photography by

PATCHEN BARSS

LORNE BRIDGMAN

MICHAEL INZLICHT was a post-doctoral fellow in applied

psychology at New York University in 2002 when he first heard the term “ego depletion.” A recent academic study had suggested that using your self-control or willpower on one task made it more difficult to apply it to others. The concept helped to explain why people might skip the gym after a stressful week at work or give up on a diet after having to soothe an unhappy child all day.

For Inzlicht, ego depletion was a revelation. “I had never heard of it,” he says. “My adviser mentioned it to me and I thought, ‘This is such an elegant theory. It seems so intuitively real and true.’” He decided he wanted to study it himself.

Five years passed, and Inzlicht, who had become a professor of psychology at U of T Scarborough, was focusing his own research primarily on ego depletion. He had attracted a number of grants because of it and that year had written an influential paper on the topic. “I was definitely excited,” he says. “I thought I was onto something big and important and I wanted the whole world to know.” Soon after, he received tenure at U of T. In a sense, he felt ego depletion had helped secure his career.

Then, in 2011, he read a Psychological Science article called “False-Positive Psychology” that shook his faith in his own research.

“It detailed all the possible steps a researcher could take to make nonsense research findings appear to make sense,” he says. The paper described common practices in the field – drawing conclusions from a small number of observations,

making subjective, on-the-fly judgments about how to collect and interpret data, and reporting only what “worked” and not what didn’t – that could lead to false positive results.

Inzlicht began to question the early experiments that had helped forge his career. His worry turned to doubt, which devolved into a conviction that he had made some of the very errors the paper described.

“I don’t remember exactly what I did to get my early research results but I have no doubt that they were shaped by what we now know are questionable research practices,” he says.

“One study had 42 participants divided into four groups. In hindsight, this is severely underpowered. Even if the results I’d been seeking were true, I’d be very unlikely to find it from those small numbers.”

Across social psychology, as well as in economics, health sciences and other disciplines, many seemingly well-­ established concepts and theories were being called into question. Efforts to replicate many studies – to derive the same results from experiments performed using the same parameters as the original study – were not successful.

Scientists are now debating the severity of the so-called “replication crisis” and what to do about it. Inzlicht and several other U of T researchers, along with colleagues from around the world, have begun advocating for improvements to research methods.

Among these champions of change, Inzlicht stood out for his candidness and deep emotion. In essays, blog posts and interviews, he has publicly called into question his own career-making research. He bluntly chronicled the systemic problems that had caused the crisis, and also acknowledged how his own work embodied those flaws.

“What I discovered about myself was not pleasant. It hurt to learn that my early papers were dominated by findings that did not appear robust; it was upsetting to think that my early work stood a decent chance of not replicating,” he wrote in 2016. “To publicly admit my past shortcomings was scary.”

He was worried for his job, for the respect of his colleagues and for his prospects. More than any of that, though, he just felt dispirited by the idea that many years of hard work might have been for nothing.

“If I admit the field is rotten, that means I have contributed to that rot. That’s hard. I’m going through turmoil as a result of that,” he says.

Inzlicht’s dejection came with a sort of grim resolve. He still believes social psychology research can demonstrate meaningful, interesting, real effects. Getting there requires better research methods. It also means going back and testing, questioning – and possibly rejecting – many longaccepted concepts.

“I really admired Michael’s approach,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virgina and a co-founder of the independent Center for Open Science, based in Charlottesville,

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What It Means to Replicate a Study Replication studies put researchers’ conclusions to the test by creating new versions of the original experiment.

In principle, a well-designed and well-documented experiment will accurately describe a real phenomenon and provide other researchers with everything they need to reproduce those results in a comparable study.

To replicate an experiment, researchers use the same methods of data collection and apply the same analysis, even though they have to use new subjects, often in somewhat different situations. Subjects may be generally older or younger, for example, or from a different country.

While later tests can’t possibly be identical to the original, they need to be similar enough to yield comparable data.

Concepts like “similar enough” and “comparable data” involve a level of subjectivity that adds to the controversy around replication. When a study fails a replication attempt, defenders often question whether the followup truly reflected the original.

Researchers help to resolve such debates when they openly share their data and methods.

– PATCHEN BARSS

Virginia. Nosek spearheaded attempts to replicate results from 97 published psychology studies that had claimed a posi­ tive result; 35 were successful. “He very effectively captured a feeling that many researchers have of wanting to resist the evidence about reproducibility but also being concerned by it.

He gave voice to that reaction: What does this mean to my work? Should I be doubting my contributions?”

Nosek calls what’s happening now “science at its best.”

“Maintaining that constant self-skepticism, testing to see if our field is as robust as it can be is how science is supposed to work,” he says.

ELIZABETH PAGE-GOULD, a U of T psychology professor and

a colleague of Inzlicht’s, is among those calling for more open and transparent research practices. “Even simple measures would help,” she says, such as providing “badges” on papers that indicate where to find the source materials and data online, or asking researchers to “preregister” their hypothesis to ensure that it doesn’t change later to suit the results.

The experiment’s outcome – successful or not – should be mea­ sured against its original intent, she says.

Gould, Inzlicht and others also emphasize the need to report on “failed studies.”

Scientists have a deep aversion to asserting straight-up success or failure. They rarely describe results in terms of truth or falsehood. Instead, they speak about “degrees of certainty.” It’s why virologists say, “There’s no credible

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evidence that vaccines cause autism,” rather than the more definitive “Vaccines don’t cause autism.”

If an experiment fails to support a hypothesis, a researcher naturally considers whether the study had flaws. They try again, controlling for different variables, adjusting para­ meters and working to remove factors that might create a “false negative.”

If on, say, the 20th attempt, the data reveal the expected effect – hypothesis confirmed. It is possible, and can feel reasonable, to publish the successful results and dismiss the 19 practice runs.

But, what if all the tweaking and adjusting didn’t actually do anything, and that final outcome merely resulted from random variations in the data?

Researchers have an indicator for that eventuality, which involves something called a “probability value” or “p-value.”

The p-value describes how likely it is that random variations in data could show an effect when there really isn’t one.

The p-factor is written as a decimal number between zero and one. The closer to zero, the more likely it is that the observed effect is real.

Sample size, data precision and other factors can affect p-values. An experiment is commonly considered solid if its p-value is no more than 0.05, meaning there’s a one in 20 chance the observed effect comes from random variation.

But each new attempt at fine tuning makes a random blip more likely. Not reporting the pre-success tests distorts the significance of that one positive result. Such selective reporting is known as “p-hacking,” and it’s one of the major reasons studies fail to replicate.

ACADEMIC JOURNALS AND INSTITUTIONS have also contributed to the replication crisis through their tendency to favour positive results over negative.

Institutions’ policies have been changing, including those of U of T. “We’re developing standards for data management, and moving toward more open and accessible data,” says Vivek Goel, the university’s vice-president, research and innovation, and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He says replicability must be viewed as an indicator of research excellence.

Many journals have also started to address their role in the replication crisis.

Peter Morrow, a U of T professor of economics, is the data editor for the Canadian Journal of Economics. That journal now has a policy that papers must include all data and the processes researchers used to generate results.

Morrow says transparency helps reveal (valid) subjective judgments that often lead to economists reaching different conclusions from identical data.

“Suppose you and I were studying the history of employment levels in Puerto Rico,” he says. “You might say, ‘The last couple

of months were weird because of the hurricanes. I should drop them because they are less likely to be indicative of long-term trends.’ But I might say we should keep them because they add information and we don’t know how long-lasting their effects might be. These are subjective edits. Even though we start with the same data, we end up with different results.”

Subjectivity isn’t inherently problematic. In fact, it’s part of good science. Trouble arises when biases and judgment are obscured.

“Certain widely used statistical practices seem justifiable in the moment, but can easily inflate the rate of false discoveries. They used to be considered not optimal, but acceptable. That perception has changed now,” says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at U of T Mississauga.

Schimmack has worked for years to develop new tests and tools to improve replicability. “People are demanding more rigorous statistical analysis. The whole perception of what is proper science has changed in psychology.”

Replicating a study can be expensive, difficult and timeconsuming. Statistics can reduce the costs – and the effort.

“I have developed a statistical tool that tells us what we could expect if we did replication studies,” he says. In other words, he can test for replicability without actually running the experiment again. He calls his replicability index “a doping test for science.”

His statistical models, which he continually refines and tests against real-life replication efforts, use sample size, experiment design and a range of other factors to predict the likelihood of replicability. He reviews and assesses published studies to measure whether the crisis is improving.

What Will Solve the Replication Crisis?

U of T scholars and others are calling for four major changes to how research is conducted

“I started tracking studies from 2010,” he says. “Up to 2015 there’s no change. In 2016 there’s something, but only in 2017 does it seem there’s a real change.”

He hopes that tools like his will push researchers, institutions, funding agencies and journals to make replicability a cornerstone of research excellence.

Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, says the research community has “made a kind of mess for ourselves,” but he cautions that plenty of psychology research remains solid.

“There are facts about how human psychology works,” he says, describing effects such as optical illusions, after-image effects, verbal overshadowing (where the act of recounting an experience changes your memory of it) and the “cocktail party effect,” where you can hear your name spoken in a crowd even if your attention is elsewhere.

He cautions against wholesale dismissal of real psychological effects.

Inzlicht still believes that ego depletion is real. But he has all but given up on trying to capture it in an experiment. Meanwhile, he has changed his research methods and continually checks his more recent work for replicability. For what it’s worth, he says, these new approaches are making a difference.

“What’s frustrating, and it’s a field-wide problem, is that the work we’re doing now should have been done from the beginning,” he says. “The first bricks were never laid. Instead an entire edifice was built without a strong foundation.”

Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in science, technology, research and culture.

SHARING DATA

More researchers are making their data, calculations and reasoning public, which makes it easier for other scientists to find weaknesses (and understand strengths).

Public data also advances science, allowing other scientists to run fresh analyses and seek new insights. U of T’s Structural Genomics Consortium has gained global recognition for its open-data policies.

PREREGISTERING EXPERIMENTS

The Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and other organizations encourage researchers to document their experiments before they begin. “U of T is out in front on this,” says U of T psychology prof Elizabeth Page-Gould. “The Center for Open Science released data on which universities have the most preregistrations, and we’re number two in the world.”

ADDRESSING INSTITUTIONAL BIAS TOWARD POSITIVE RESULTS

Academic journals still want highly cited

papers, which tend to feature positive results.

University employment, research funding, and tenure also tend to favour positive results over negative. Vivek Goel, U of T’s vicepresident, research and innovation, says many important cultural changes happen at the departmental level through hiring decisions and mentoring styles. “That researchers and departments are showing leadership to ensure there is as much rigour and reproducibility as possible is really important.”

FUNDING MORE REPLICATION STUDIES

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s little funding available for researchers seeking to confirm existing discoveries. But Brian Nosek, co-founder of the Center for Open Science, says testing replicability wouldn’t actually cost that much. “We can be selective in what we test for replications,” Nosek says.

“Only a very small subset of research has a major impact that changes the direction of a field.”

– PATCHEN BARSS

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FINDING COMFORT IN FOOD

Edna Staebler was 55 when her marriage ended. She thought she would grow old alone, impoverished and unhappy.

Then she wrote a cookbook Written by

STACEY GIBSON

IN 1961, EDNA STAEBLER – writer, homemaker and future

cookbook author – was suffering the sort of black misery that comes from divorce. Her husband of 28 years had told her their marriage was over. He was leaving her to marry one of her best friends – the woman she had confided in about her husband’s drinking, the unkind words he hurled at her while drunk, his constant philandering. The couple had no children; they hadn’t had sex in the past 22 years. Staebler was 55, with precarious employment as a freelance writer. She thought she would grow old alone, impoverished and unhappy, and that her best years were behind her. She cried herself to sleep every night for a year.

Then, the tears stopped. The best years of her life were soon to begin.

Staebler’s life-changing moment came at the age of 60, when an editor asked her to write a Mennonite cookbook.

Staebler (BA 1929 UC) had just published a collection of her articles about the Mennonite and Amish in her hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. One of her best-known pieces, which ran in Maclean’s, was “How to Live Without Wars and Wedding Rings.” In it, she captures the pleasures of simple

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family life and the beliefs of Old Order Mennonites by richly detailing the lives of Bevvy Martin and her family.

Staebler wrote about Bevvy again in Food That Really Schmecks, recording her recipes – as well as those of other Mennonite women and Staebler’s own mother – for the cookbook. But what differentiated Schmecks from other cookbooks, and turned it into a classic, was Staebler’s storytelling.

Weaved between the recipes of Mennonite comfort food – shoo-fly pie and grumbara knepp (potato dumplings); apple fritters and kraut wickel (cabbage rolls) – are stories of Bevvy in her fieldstone farmhouse who “is always busy schnitzing (cutting up apples for drying)” and who has her recipes in “a little handwritten black notebook, well-worn and some of its pages spattered with lard.” Schmecks – first published 50 years ago – sold tens of thousands of copies upon release, which was an incredible number for Canada in 1968. A commemorative edition was released in 2006 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, shortly after Staebler’s death.

By Staebler’s own admission, she had “no qualification for writing a cookbook except that I was brought up and well fed in Waterloo Country.” (In fact, in her 60s, she owned only two cookbooks: a Betty Crocker classic and a Mennonite one, both gifts.) But she didn’t need to be a chef: it was her ability to use food as a storytelling vehicle to evoke home and hearth, and to open a window into the houses of others, that drew readers. Through her recipes and stories on comfort food, she was offering emotional sustenance. “I think she popularized the Canadian cookbook,” says Veronica Ross, who wrote the biography To Experience Wonder: Edna Staebler, a Life (2003). “They’re for people who like good food with simple ingredients. The recipes are not 25 steps, and she would sometimes say, ‘If you don’t have the ingredient, just go on.’

The stories just made you feel good about life.”

While Staebler was best known as a cookbook writer, she didn’t always embrace the role. At first, she was embarrassed to talk about working on recipes with her writer friends (although that would change, when she realized how much happiness readers derived from Schmecks). She also faced stereotypes: there was a tendency for the public to pigeonhole her as a docile, grandmotherly, stay-at-home cookie-baker – likely something many female cooks and food writers of her generation faced. “She always said, ‘I’m not just a sweet dumpling of a cookbook writer,’” says Ross, noting that Staebler was very independent – and feisty when it came to pushing publishers on matters of marketing and royalties. “She was approachable, but she was very intelligent and astute.”

Her independent streak showed early, at U of T. While it wasn’t the norm for women to attend university in the 1920s, Staebler was determined to see life beyond KitchenerWaterloo. She enrolled in the general arts program at University College, wrote for the Varsity, attended dances at Hart House and stayed in Queen’s Hall residence. (Alas, it was also here

There was a tendency for the public to pigeonhole Edna Staebler (BA 1929 UC) as a docile, grandmotherly, stay-at-home cookie-baker. But she was very independent – and feisty when it came to pushing publishers on matters of marketing and royalties

she made friends with Helen MacDonald – the woman who, almost 40 years later, would run off with her husband.)

“Her U of T days were totally liberating,” says Ross. “I have to say her grades in high school were terrible and sometimes she had to repeat courses: I think she just needed that university experience to make her think and to expose her to a wider world.”

Staebler’s list of published books grew throughout her 60s, 70s and 80s. Her favourite, Cape Breton Harbour – set in the fishing village of Neil’s Harbour in Nova Scotia – was released in 1972, two decades after she first sought a publisher for it.

She wrote More Food That Really Schmecks and Schmecks Appeal. Her last book, Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letter from the ’50s, was published when she was 89. She also established the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 1991, which has helped Canadian writers from Charlotte Gray to Wayson Choy.

Staebler died at the age of 101, peacefully in her sleep, at a nursing home in Waterloo. “I think Edna is an inspiration

not just for what she did at her age, but how she did it and how she lived her life,” says Ross, who noted that Staebler chose not to be bitter about her marriage, but to see the wonder in every day. “She had a lot of life experience, but she had the eyes of a knowing child – meaning she found something fresh all the time.”

In a diary entry from July 17, 1991, when Staebler was 85, she broke her life into a trilogy: “The first twenty-eight were difficult, searching years, trying to find who I was, not at all sure of my identity. The twenty-eight married years were more difficult, trying to live Keith’s life and cope with his alcoholism and both our insecurities. The last twenty-eight years I’ve been living my own way and loving it and being creative, having fun and many friends and readers who love my books.”

“I regret none of it.”

Stacey Gibson is U of T Magazine’s deputy editor.

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Every year, thousands of Canadians die from preventable harm in hospitals across the country.

Yet medical errors have long been hidden in the shadows because clinicians fear losing their jobs or status, leaders fear litigation and hospitals fear losing funding. Leaders at the University Health Network, including Emily Musing (BScPhm 1983, MHSc 2003), have declared this has to change. They are vowing to reduce instances of preventable harm to zero

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MAKE NO MISTAKE Can a group of Toronto hospitals eliminate medical errors?

Written by

Photography by

MARCIA KAYE

LORNE BRIDGMAN

AS A HEALTH-CARE PROFESSIONAL, Emily Lap Sum Musing

was well aware that mistakes can – and do – happen in hospitals. But the extent of the problem didn’t hit home for Musing, the chief patient safety officer at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) and a professor in U of T’s faculties of Pharmacy and Medicine, until it affected her own father, Yin Ling Wong.

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Wong was an independent and energetic senior when a complication from his home dialysis treatment for diabetes sent him to an Ontario hospital in 2012. He was put on antibiotics and told he’d be home in two weeks. But while in hospital he contracted C. difficile, a serious gut infection, and was put in isolation. And that’s where he caught yet another infection, the same upper respiratory one as the patient in the next isolation room. The most likely way for him to have contracted it was from one of the hospital staff, says Musing.

Her father was eventually moved to a rehab wing. But a few days later, when Musing (BScPhm 1983, MHSc 2003) visited him, he mentioned that he felt pain around the site where his abdominal drain had been. Musing saw that the area was obviously infected and looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in days. She ran to the staff, saying, “Something needs to be done about his drain site!” The response: “What drain site?”

Musing was distressed by the lapses in hygiene and communication that led to her father’s three hospital-acquired infections and extended his stay by several months. And she realized that those three infections weren’t inevitable; they were all potentially preventable. “This really opened my eyes to the importance of safety in any health-care environment,” she says. “When your dad is in there and you can’t be with him 24 hours a day checking everything yourself – and many people wouldn’t even know what to check if they’re not from a health-care environment – you really depend on those individuals in that organization to know what they’re doing.”

Hospital errors have become so common that many of us may not even realize they’re errors. The rare and dramatic cases of surgeons amputating the wrong leg or leaving a clamp inside a patient make the news, but thousands of other, more mundane errors do not. We think of them as merely the cost of doing business. We assume that very ill and vulnerable people in hospital are simply prone to unfortunate events – infections, falls, bedsores, adverse reactions to medications – and we may not recognize that thousands of these are preventable.

UHN has decided that this situation must not continue. In 2015, it took the bold step of developing a system-wide program called Caring Safely. UHN – the health-care and medical

Hospital Errors by the Numbers

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research organization that includes Toronto General Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Western Hospital and several Toronto Rehab sites – has partnered with Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children to roll out the program to leaders and staff at all its facilities. Caring Safely has one overarching, highly ambitious goal: to reduce to zero the number of preventable harmful events at these facilities, which see more than one million patients a year.

Ross Baker (PhD 1982), a professor at U of T’s Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation who specializes in patient safety, co-authored a groundbreaking study in 2004 that first exposed the problem in Canadian hospitals.

He then replicated the study in other adult and pediatric hospitals and home care settings, here and in several communities in Europe and South America, and found similar results everywhere: between eight and 12 per cent of patients experience unintended injury. “The reality is that patients are being harmed on an ongoing basis, and because of this they’re spending longer time in hospital and recovering slower,” Baker says.

Dr. Peter Pisters, UHN’s outgoing president and CEO, puts it more bluntly. He says patients trust that hospitals are functioning at a high level of safety. “But if most patients were to really understand the inside-baseball aspects of this,” he says, “they would be horrified.” Every year between 17,000 and 30,000 Canadians die from hospital harm in large and small hospitals across the country. “It’s like a jumbo jet crashing every week,” Pisters says.

Out of the Shadows

The first step forward was the toughest: acknowledging the problem. Hospital errors have long been hidden in the shadows because clinicians fear losing their jobs or status, leaders fear litigation and hospitals fear losing public or private funding. Historically, errors often went unacknowledged, or else they were documented through the cumbersome process of incidence reports – many of which were ignored, lost in red tape or dealt with in secret. So for UHN to shine a spotlight on the problem made for a courageous and not particularly popular move. “If you’re the only hospital saying there are safety issues, the tendency is for the public to think, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s only a problem in this hospital!’”

1 IN 18

200,000

$400,000,000

According to figures from a 2016 study, one in every 18 patients in Canadian hospitals experiences a preventable incidence of harm.

At least 200,000 patients a year acquire infections in Canadian hospitals that they didn’t have when they arrived.

Preventable hospital errors cost us almost $400 million a year – and this doesn’t include lost productivity due to illness.

Dr. Charles Chan, UHN’s interim CEO

says Musing. “Certainly the Ministry of Health does not want to go out there and cause panic by saying there’s a big safety issue. No one wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole.”

But UHN did. To kick-start a new transparency, UHN’s leaders chose to fess up, in videos and interviews, about their own worst errors. Dr. Charles Chan, the interim CEO and president of UHN and a professor of medicine at U of T, admitted that when he was a young doctor, he prescribed the wrong chemotherapy to a patient. “It meant he was given at least two drugs he did not need, and it delayed his real chemo by at least a month,” Chan recalls. “Did it result in a lesser chance of him receiving a cure? We don’t know. I still feel terrible.”

In the second year of her nursing career, Joy Richards, UHN’s vice-president, patient experience, and chief of health professions, gave the wrong dose of a concentrated codeine medication. A senior nurse had written “5 CCs” in large loopy letters, which Richards (BScN 1981, MScN 2000) misread as “50 CCs” and gave that amount to the young female patient.

It was only when the staff did a narcotic count that night that the error came to light. “And that’s when I had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was actually going to kill her,” Richards says. She didn’t sleep a wink that night and called the unit every hour to check on the patient.

The young woman survived. But Richards says, “Even when I’m telling the story I feel kind of sick, all these years later.”

In 2002, Pisters was riding high as an accomplished surgeon at the largest cancer facility in the world, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (to which he returned in December as president). But after a complex

operation he realized a surgical sponge had been left in the patient. He had to re-operate on the man the next morning to remove it. In the U.S. with its private-payer system, Medicare does not pay for extra hospital days or procedures resulting directly from an obvious medical error. The surgeon or the facility must pay. (There’s no similar financial penalty in Canada, but hospital errors cost us all, because patients who should be going home are taking up beds.)

Pisters was devastated and humiliated. He worried about the repercussions for the patient – who, as it turned out, suffered no long-term harm from the extra 20-minute procedure – but also for himself, his family and the hospital. “The provider can become the second victim,” he says. “You feel tremendous responsibility, you feel guilt, you second-guess your decisionmaking.” But Pisters also realized he had a role to play in preventing mistakes, and he’s been the driving force behind Caring Safely.

The UHN leaders’ public admissions of errors gave per­ mission for others to acknowledge safety issues. As Dr. Brian Goldman (MD 1980), an emergency physician and broadcaster, wrote in the Autumn 2017 issue of U of T Magazine, “If you weeded out all the health professionals who make errors, there wouldn’t be anybody left.”

Bundles and Huddles

The next step in the Caring Safely program was to focus on six common preventable hospital-acquired conditions: C. difficile; central line infections (a central line is an IV line inserted into a large vein, usually in the neck or near the heart); adverse events from medications; surgical site infections; pressure ulcers (also called bedsores); and falls.

The program also looked at workplace safety for staff, since a worker is harmed every 1.5 days, and chose three areas of focus: musculoskeletal injuries, workplace violence and falls.

“Not every error is preventable but the vast majority are,” Musing says.

A “bundle,” or set of practices, has been designed for each one of these, detailing the specific steps to prevent an incident. For instance, preventing surgical site infections requires strict procedures by many people: the medical secretary who gives the pre-op instructions to the patient to bathe the day before the surgery, the assistant who preps the surgical area, the operating room nurses and technicians who drape the patient, the surgical team who starts and stops preventive antibiotics and makes sure the patient is warmed to a certain temperature before the stitches are done, and the post-op and home care team. “Each part is seemingly a small piece,” says Chan (MD 1981), “but if you don’t do all of them, it’s a setup for a surgical site infection.”

Another new feature is daily safety “huddles.” These take place in every patient care unit. Staff meet briefly to talk about

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any issues from the previous 24 hours and concerns about the next 24. “Before we rolled out these huddles, it was actually kind of embarrassing,” says Chan, “because even a well-set-up restaurant has a huddle before they open the doors, where they talk about issues or daily specials. But at a hospital, people just basically show up for work.” Now at UHN they talk and share concerns. Daily huddles take place at all levels, from individual units up to executives. Information now flows quickly and concerns keep getting escalated up until they’re dealt with. Richards says, “Clinical nurses tell me that, without exception, the best thing UHN has done in the past 10 years is develop these huddles, because for the first time they see that their concerns are not only heard but acted upon.”

Caring Safely has borrowed principles from organizations such as airlines, nuclear power plants and chemical facilities, where reliability is paramount. These industries operate in risky environments but have extremely low rates of mistakes because of their adherence to strict safety protocols and their emphasis on safety as everyone’s responsibility. When a hospital begins its high-reliability transformation, the rate of serious safety events paradoxically goes up, due to better recording and reporting of mistakes. But after it peaks, it falls dramatically. Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio – one of the largest pediatric hospitals in the U.S., which began its transformation a decade ago – has seen its rate of “serious safety events” fall from one every 11 days to one every 183 days. UHN’s rate is fluid right now, says Musing. But SickKids, which began its transformation earlier than UHN, has already seen a drop of about 30 per cent.

Soon UHN units will begin to display the number of days without a serious event.

Changing the Culture

It’s one thing to put policies and procedures in place. It’s quite another to change the entire culture of an organization.

“The culture change of our Caring Safely initiative is the one that’s the hardest and will take the longest,” Musing says, “but it’s the one that will have the greatest impact.”

Patient safety relies on teamwork, collaboration and mutual respect. But hospitals have traditionally been hierarchical “caste systems,” says Pisters, with physicians at the top.

As residents, “they’re often trained alone, so you get a very autonomous, hierarchical, often self-interested individual who finds it very challenging and unfamiliar to work in teams or even speak up and challenge authority themselves.

So there’s a gradually evolved culture of fear.”

Historically a nurse would not question a physician’s order and would not speak up if she saw a physician walk into a patient’s room and not wash his or her hands. “Either you’d get yelled at or humiliated, or you deferred to them because

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you’d think, ‘Well, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,’” says Richards. “We need to change this culture. It’s not helpful.” In addition, hospitals have often dealt with errors by using blame and shame, focusing on an individual instead of on a flawed system.

Patients and family members have been lowest in the hierarchy. In 2010, Katie Harris was in Toronto Western Hospital, recovering from spinal cord surgery. The surgeon had told her not to let anyone touch the tube that was draining excess fluid from her spine, or she’d risk serious infection and possibly another surgery. But a nurse disregarded Harris’s repeated warnings and carelessly dislodged the tube, causing spinal fluid to leak all over the bed. “I was terrified for days that I’d get an infection,” Harris remembers. Luckily she was OK, but she says, “I felt the nurse didn’t listen to me. It created a traumatic experience that didn’t need to happen.”

To change this hierarchy into a more just culture where everyone is listened to, the Caring Safely program is supporting all of UHN’s 16,000 leaders and staff through an educational program. The almost 700 leaders will undertake seven two-hour training modules, and so far 60 per cent of the staff have had a three-hour training session (many more will complete the training early in 2018) that gives them both the authority to raise their concerns and the exact words to use: “I have a safety concern” or “I need to ask a clarifying question.” Everyone now must wear a reminder card listing safety behaviours and tools to prevent errors. And Harris is now one of more than 80 patient partners involved in committees and focus groups.

Culture change is slow, admits Chan, the interim CEO. “We have to kick and push some of my docs to go into the training sessions. They may say, ‘I know all of this.’ Well, no, you don’t. What we are trying to get into your mindset is, we’re all in this together.” The Caring Safely program may need another three to five years to fully transform UHN, but Chan has no doubt that eventually, even the strongest resisters will be on board, due to a simple fact: “Someday you’ll be a patient yourself,” he says. “And when you’re in that situation, you will want to be safe.”

Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is a journalist in Aurora, Ontario.

DAVE WILTON TURNING POINTS

AS TOLD TO SHARON ASCHAIEK

WORK

1990–1998, 2003–2004

Arms control analyst and project manager 2004–2008

Product manager and marketing writer at NVIDIA 2000–2003, 2008–2010 LANGUAGES

English Old English Middle English Latin Old Norse WEBSITE

Wordorigins.org I’ve been interested in word origins for as long as I can remember. Take the phrase “the whole nine yards.”

There are so many tales about where it came from – and all of them are wrong. (It seems to have come from a joke about someone using too much cloth to make a shirt.) On my site, I’ve written about hundreds of words and phrases.

Self-employed as marketing consultant and writer 2016–PRESENT

Lecturer at Texas A&M University EDUCATION

1981–1985

BA, Government and Law, Lafayette College 1989–1992

MA, Security Policy Studies, George Washington University

I built my first career in an area I cared about – arms control. I helped the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force with weapons counter-proliferation and with verification technology. I also helped a defense contractor with efforts to dismantle Soviet-era nuclear weapons. It was a thrill to get the Washington Post and see news about my field on the front page.

I saw it would be difficult to gain full-time work from the Department of Defense, so I headed west to Silicon Valley. There, I helped build the hardware and software for rendering images that production studios use for visual effects and animation. It was a great opportunity to work with creative people in film, TV and video games.

I’d always loved writing so I followed my passion for language and the origins of words.

I decided to go back to school and chose U of T for its superb reputation in medieval studies.

It was incredible to have access to the Dictionary of Old English, a comprehensive and globally distinguished resource. The dictionary’s former editor, Toni Healey, was a great mentor to me.

I’m looking for a tenure-track position teaching medieval literature. I’m also working on a book about the history of the term “Anglo-Saxon.”

I’m not sure how things will turn out for me in this field, but I have many skills to fall back on.

I’m less concerned with career growth than I am in doing something that really interests me.

2010–2016

PhD, English, University of Toronto

I’VE HAD VERY DIFFERENT JOBS IN MY LIFE, BUT I’VE NEVER BEEN AFRAID OF CHANGE

WINTER 2018

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PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

MIND GAMES

Economists have long known that consumers can make confounding choices when presented with too much selection. But they’ve never agreed on why. Enter neuroscience Written by

Photography by

JOHN LORINC

VICKY LAM

ON THE WAY BACK TO TORONTO from a trip to upstate New York, I plucked up my courage and pulled into a factory outlet mall outside St. Catharines, Ontario. I am a terrible shopper who hates to spend money, and I had delayed replacing my lousy winter jacket for years. Yet the North Face sign on the mall’s exterior beckoned. There would be big sales. I had time. And my wife, who shops for clothes well, was not only in the car but willing to offer advice.

When we got inside, however, I was seized with a crushing desire to leave. Some consumers see a proliferation of choice as a plus; to me, it’s oppressive. After 15 minutes, I found a high-quality coat that ticked all the boxes. But when I asked the clerk to calculate the discount, he served up a final price far higher than the admittedly arbitrary amount I had set out to spend. Indignant for no good reason, I left empty handed.

Now here’s the (predictable) punchline: two weeks later, with the weather getting colder, I forced myself to go to a mall and bought an almost identical parka – for a paltry $36 less. I did finally address my need, but the approach verged on nonsensical.

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WINTER 2018 63

PLAN B

THE POWER OF REINVENTION

Last year’s Nobel Prize for economics recognized that many consumers like me are predictably irrational, and make choices based not on a Spock-like calculation of self-interest but for reasons that are sometimes a little silly.

The Nobel winner, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler, is a pioneer in the field of behavioural economics. His research seeks to explain irrational or self-defeating choices in a field that had long assumed rational decision-making by consumers, investors and other market actors.

Behavioural economics has drawn heavily on research by psychologists who explore how the human brain processes decisions, including how it arrives at a bad decision. But in the past decade or so, the field has expanded further. New studies incorporate neurological findings about the brain, and how these affect choice, says U of T behavioural economist Yoram Halevy. “This is a research agenda that is just beginning,” he observes.

Ryan Webb, a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, has published a groundbreaking neuro­ economics study that explains why some consumers feel overwhelmed or make poor choices when confronted with too many options. His collaborators are Paul Glimcher and Kenway Louie, both of New York University’s Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making. “We know your ability to make the optimal choice gets worse when you have to choose from more things,” he says. “You make more errors and sometimes you don’t even buy anything.”

The crux of Webb’s findings involves neurological insights into the way the senses work and the role they play in decision-­ making and perception. Neural networks can only hold so much information, Webb explains. The brain, after all, is finite in size, and all sorts of critical functions, such as breathing and heartbeat, need to function constantly in the background – a bit like the operating system of your computer.

Consequently, neural networks function as efficiently as possible. If we needed one set of neurons to read in bright light and another for low light, for example, we’d soon run out of grey matter. Instead, our brains have adaptive mechanisms.

The neural systems that create this kind of perceptual flexibility, in fact, share similarities with the compression technologies used to store large quantities of digital data.

“The organization and form of neural computation have evolved such that information about the objective world is approximated,” write Webb, Glimcher and Louie. “It is only natural to examine what these constraints imply for choice behaviour, and whether theories of economic behaviour need to incorporate these insights.”

As it turns out, these constraints seem to explain a lot.

Webb and his collaborators conducted lab experiments to show what’s happening in the brain when it is presented with a growing number of appealing, or “high value” choices.

Under conventional economic theory, Webb says, if someone

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prefers an apple over other fruits, their degree of preference shouldn’t be affected if they are offered a choice of two, three or 10 fruits.

But lab observations – conducted in part by Louie, a neural researcher – showed, among other things, that when people were presented with an increased number of appealing choices, their capacity to make the right one actually diminished. When the brain tries to sort among too many options that have been compressed into a finite neural network, its capacity to distinguish between them becomes less effective and efficient. “When they are compressed, different items appear to be ‘closer’ [in value],” Webb says. “So when asked to pick between them, you might make errors.”

Halevy points out that the techniques in both behavioural economics and neuroscience involve randomized trials and experiments, including neurological studies that track blood flow in various regions of the brain as individuals are presented with different options. “It’s become much more of a science in the traditional sense compared to what economics was in the 1960s.”

The research in these fields, Halevy notes, point toward several applications, including better bargaining and negotiating strategies that could have implications for everything from real estate transactions to labour contracts.

Webb, for his part, says his team’s empirical findings also have the potential to improve public policy outcomes.

By carefully constructing and restricting the service options presented to individuals, governments could, at least in theory, subtly steer families toward choices that will benefit them. As Webb, Glimcher and Louie conclude, “Our results speak to the role of incorporating insights from biology into economic discourse.” – JOHN LORINC

Writing Contest The winners of the 2017 U of T Magazine writing contest are Chris Gilmore (MA 2014) in the short story category for “Fanny & Keats,” and Laura Cok (BA 2010 UTSC, MA 2011) for her poem “Somewhere between me and the desert.”

Each winner received a grand prize of $1,000.

SHORT STORY WINNER

Fanny & Keats

by Chris Gilmore

ILLUSTRATION: CRISTIAN FOWLIE

Winter 2018 65

Writing Contest

WE TOOK THE TRAIN NORTH to see some snow. Fall was indecisive.

Too cold for shorts, too warm for a jacket. We wanted a season that knew where it stood.

“Nothing more peaceful than a winter night,” she said.

“No sounds. No sights. No smells. Just stripped-down, emptied-out reality.”

Winter was the world on pause. A chance to catch your breath, to drift through the air like a snowflake taking its time to fall.

THE TRAIN STATION WAS PACKED. Couples of all ages, children

of every shape and size. Emily found a seat by the window, away from TVs and conversations. We put down our bags and pulled out our notebooks.

Side by side, silent, suspiciously still, we looked to the street for inspiration. Despite the absence of winter, I jotted down phrases like “snow-speckled hat” and “wind-tugged scarf,” sentences like “The snow tickled my face and snuggled my beard.” Bits and pieces. Scraps of something.

Emily stared at her page, pen tip hovering just above.

“Still blocked?” I asked.

She nodded without looking my way. Sometimes she doodled when she couldn’t write. Today she just sat there and stared.

“Excited for snow?”

She nodded again, with even less enthusiasm.

Poets usually picked our destinations. Hart Crane took us to Brooklyn, Frost to New Hampshire. This time, I wanted to go south, but Emily thought warmth was the wrong kind of escape.

“At least for now. For where we are creatively.”

I was glad she didn’t say “emotionally.”

To make my case for warmer climates, I quoted Eliot: “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

“You really want to let ‘The Waste Land’ make our plans?”

She had a point. But instead of hiding behind a happier poem, she countered with more of the same: “Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.”

“Touché,” I said, both defeated and proud.

“Bested again by my superior brain.”

She used to say this with a wink, or at least a grin. Now it was simply a matter of fact.

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We booked a motel room 800 miles north.

Wordsworth, the Travel Agent. Byron, the GPS. A silly ritual, I know, but fun for part-time poets. Even if the words we quoted meant something else entirely, we enjoyed taking things out of context, turning light into darkness and darkness into light.

OUR TRAIN SHIVERED ITS WAY through the field, moaning into the sunset. Every few minutes, a storm cloud appeared.

Hovering, threatening, moving on. Saving itself for something better.

“Al,” whispered the woman across the aisle, after an hour of silence. “Are you sure?”

Al considered her question, frowning. “We gave it a shot.”

“Yeah,” she mumbled. “I guess.” She looked down at the tissue in her lap, half-embarrassed, half-resigned.

Emily was still asleep on my shoulder. Whispers never woke her.

When Al and his companion had boarded they were chatting about stock prices, sales reports, some guy in accounting named Phil. They were smiling, talkative, full of jokes and nudges. Then came the awkward lull, the gaze-avoidance.

Al started his speech with “Look” and ended with “Sorry.”

The rest was muttered, either out of respect for his companion or embarrassment for himself.

Who they were, what they did, where and why they were going, I never found out. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was where they were, what they were doing.

Al’s companion began folding her tissue into bite-sized squares and triangles. She flattened it, crumpled it, wrapped it around her finger. She turned it inside-out and around, trying to find a revelation in its folds.

Al scratched his beard and adjusted his glasses. He moved his hand from his lap to the armrest, then back to his lap. He plucked something small off the sleeve of his suit and flicked it away.

His companion’s throat made a sound, a pitchy murmur.

She was trying to harness her words, shape her thoughts.

Al scanned her face, perhaps for tears, then looked down at her hands. Twitching, sculpting. He studied the tissue’s transformations.

Poets usually picked our destinations.

Hart Crane took us to Brooklyn, Frost to New Hampshire. This time, I wanted to go south, but Emily thought warmth was the wrong kind of escape

“Amy,” he finally said. “You’ll always . . .”

A ringless hand hid her face. The tissue unwound in her lap.

Al knew his duty. His chest became a pillow, his arm a sponge.

I turned back to the window and opened my notebook, searching for inspiration on the other side of the glass.

I imagined, like any responsible poet, the field coming to life, preparing its scene for the evening. A tableau of wind and snow. One whistling, the other shushing. Wind blowing snow, snow massaging wind. A mute understanding between old lovers.

A leafless tree swayed in the distance, waving to the train as it passed. I wondered how long the tree had been there, how long it might stay.

Something tickled the hair on my wrist. Emily’s fingers were sleepwalking. Her right hand traced the ink of Auden’s “Lullaby,” half-open on her lap, while her left began nuzzling my palm. I studied the lines of skin, maps of vein, mounds of bone. All moving with the rise and twist of the tracks. A song without sound. A poet and his muse.

More accurately, a poet and her muse. Two poets, two muses. Two poets-in-training on a train. Two twenty-somethings taking a trip.

Across the aisle, two thirty-somethings taking a time out.

Forever, most likely.

Would that be us in a couple years?

“Al?” I heard from Amy. A sympathetic mumble was his answer.

“Never mind.”

Beyond the puddle of Al and Amy, the field continued its nightly routine. The snow and the wind were envied, I decided, by the leafless trees, which never touched, and by the sun and the moon, which never danced, except on anniversaries, when one would blot out the other.

I looked back at the couple across the aisle. Awake with closed eyes, fingers joined, for better or worse, in a motionless dialogue. For old time’s sake. To stop old time from aging.

Our own fingers had fallen into a similar pattern.

Hairy and wide interwoven with soft and thin. Indistinguishable, perhaps, from Al and Amy’s, but still unique and autonomous.

My lips found Emily’s dozing hair. Unwashed, as usual.

Pungent, but not unpleasant. Glossy from days of neglect.

In daylight her hair was brown with flickers of blonde.

At night it was borderline black. Never quite sonnet-worthy, as she would say. Too bland, too brittle. But it was alluring, at least from a distance. From a time. Without dates, for the moment, but a time like all others. God only knew when it would expire.

I opened my notebook and started sketching: My smile melted with the sun as it dipped over the horizon, and my past joined the snow and the wind in the field.

They took shelter under a leafless tree and watched my future rattle endlessly down the track, forever slower than the setting sun it sought.

I drew an X through the page and started again: A passing barn groaned in the breeze, mumbling about better days, and as restless clouds stretched their wrinkled hands across the sky, the tree and the wind spoke, and the silence swayed from branch to branch.

“WHY TALK?” I SAID. “Why not just listen?”

“To what?”

“The sheets ruffling. The bed creaking. Your stomach rumbling . . .”

“My stomach doesn’t rumble.”

“Please. Every time we eat burritos, you hit a new high on the Richter scale.”

Emily held her breath to test my theory. She waited, motionless, watching my eyes scan her face. “All quiet on the Mexican front.”

“Be patient,” I said. “They’re just reloading.”

“And you’d rather listen to my body’s earthquakes than speak to me.”

“I’d rather speak with you, not to you.” I pulled back the

Winter 2018 67

Writing Contest

sheet to study her fault lines. My ear scouted the southern valleys, the plains of beige.

“Heard melodies are sweet,” I said, “but those unheard are sweeter.”

“Are you referring to my stomach or my conversation?”

“Both.”

“That’s not what that line means, Mr. Keats.”

I lifted my head and looked at her, semi-serious. “You think I’ll be a Keats someday?”

“Someday. Maybe. I don’t know.” She could tell I wasn’t satisfied. “You’re my Keats today. Isn’t that enough?”

“For now.”

“Now is all we have, my dear. Just ask the folks on the urn.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“Keats. Call me your Keats.”

“Your Keats.”

“Fanny, I think you know what I mean.”

She scoffed and slid down the bed, placing her chin on a hairless patch of chest. Her smile went limp as she fingered a mole.

“What an awful name,” she said, flicking a nearby hair.

“Fanny Brawne . . .”

She wore the same vacant expression as the woman on the train. The same hangdog defeat.

Al. Are you sure?

We gave it a shot.

Would that be us in a couple years? The question would not surrender.

Would I be able to see it coming? And would it matter if I did?

Did Fanny and Keats ever have this problem? Or did dying make all the odds even?

I stared at the ceiling. White and flat as a field of snow.

Spotless. Lifeless. Bare.

“Wasn’t Keats about five feet tall?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

“I bet Fanny was at least six-four, all muscle—” She grabbed her pillow and hit me in the face. “Seriously,” I continued, “with a name like Brawne—” She hit me again, grinning her favorite grin. “Stop it, Fanny—” “Or what, Mr. Keats?”

“I’ll write an ode.”

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“You wouldn’t!”

“And I’ll publish it in all the ode magazines.”

“Scoundrel!”

“And I won’t portray you fairly at all. I’ll make you an object of patriarchal pleasure. A trinket of soulless aesthetics.”

She gave me a weak slap and a weak smile, half-dead with easeful love. “An Ode to Fanny. And her brawn.”

I poked her bicep. She pecked my cheek. Our hands explored familiar terrain. Rough hands through hair, soft hands on skin.

“An Ode to Fanny,” she said, “and Her Keats.”

“I prefer my title.”

Our lips and hands and hips did their work, and the furniture watched in envy.

The wine was nearly empty, as was the room. A flowerless vase with faded images. A plastic painting of a bird, singing its silent song.

For minutes that felt like hours, the highway and the hallway were traffic-free. Snow-crunching tires had ceased, along with floor-stomping boots. Even the TV next door had turned itself off.

She said my name. I replied in iambic pentameter.

“Very funny, Mr. Keats.”

I added an English accent to my persona. “Who is this other fellow to whom you refer?”

“A poet who is about to lose his muse.”

“Is his muse going somewhere?”

“If his muse continues to be called his muse.”

“Then his muse is henceforth no longer his muse.”

“She is just Fanny.”

“Pure Fanny. Nothing but Fanny.”

“Are those your favourite websites?”

I retreated beneath the sheets. “Don’t judge me, Ms. Brawne.”

She retreated with me. “Never, Mr. Keats.”

Chris Gilmore (MA 2014) is the author of Nobodies.

His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, the New Quarterly, Matrix, Hobart, and the Puritan.

POETRY WINNER

Somewhere between me and the desert

by Laura Cok

The Judges Short Story Contest Kerry Clare (BA 2002 Victoria, MA 2007) is the author of Mitzi Bytes (2017) and the editor of the essay anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood (2014).

Stacey Gibson is the deputy editor of U of T Magazine.

There’s a trick to it, the twenty-nine bullets shimmering to the floor.

You could use a screwdriver.

You could use a different part of the gun.

How best to telegraph my harmlessness: arms extended, blood still pumping through the chambers of the heart.

Palms out: away from my body, away from yours.

The universal signal, the hope for recognition across a great distance. How long would it take?

To see whether I was a danger to him?

He says he was never a good shot.

He says after dark, the sky arced with red light.

There’s boredom, mostly, then panic, then boredom again. I grew up between the ocean and the desert.

Then I opened a book and saw it: that other sea.

In a way it was still mythological.

The grime-streaked children. The helicopters lifting off, a whirl of dust. I don’t know what it sounds like when you stand that close. It’s only cinematic: the boots, the guns, the pregnant woman walking towards the border from the other side with nothing and nothing behind her.

In class, we divided into two camps. As an exercise.

That was when he was learning his party trick, with the screwdriver.

I don’t know what sound it makes, the bullet in the chamber.

Damian Tarnopolsky is the proprietor of Slingsby and Dixon, an editorial communications firm, and the managing editor of the Toronto Review of Books. His novel Goya’s Dog was published in 2009. He teaches creative writing at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies.

Ian Williams (BSc 2000 Victoria, MA 2001, PhD 2005) has written award-winning collections of poetry and short fiction; his first novel, Reproduction, will be published in 2019. He is a professor of poetry in the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia.

Poetry Contest Laura Clarke (MA 2010) is the winner of the 2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada for her poem series “Mule Variations.”

Dani Couture is the author of several collections of poetry and the novel Algoma (2011).

Michael Fraser has been published in numerous national and international anthologies and journals, and won the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize. His latest book is To Greet Yourself Arriving (2016).

Ray Hsu (BA 2001 Victoria, MA 2002) has published two books of poetry: Anthropy (2004) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon (2010). He is a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Runners-Up and Readers’ Choice Awards Olivia Oi-Ching Or (BA 2015 Trinity) placed second in the poetry contest for “A Mother in Six Tones.”

Michelle Boone (MEd 2000 OISE, PhD 2005) took second prize in the short story contest for “The Mathematician.”

In online voting, readers selected the poem “An Open Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self,” by Jessica Concepcion (BA 2016 Victoria) as their favourite.

Online voters also selected “Down Feathers,” by Linh Nguyen (BA 2017 Victoria) as their favourite short story.

Laura Cok (BA 2010 UTSC, MA 2011) won the 2009 E.J. Pratt Medal in Poetry from U of T’s English department. She has been published in Prairie Fire, the Literary Review of Canada, Event and Arc. She lives in Toronto.

Congratulations to all winners.

Read the award-winning entries at magazine.utoronto.ca.

Winter 2018 69

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16.1222 2/17

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BOUNDLESS

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Roma and Marvin Auerback Marilyn and Charles Baillie Ruth M. (Rolph) Bell Stewart L. Blusson Jane Brushey-Martin and Geoff Martin John and Mary Cassaday Wendy M. Cecil Anson Chan Vasu Chanchlani Frances and Edmund Clark Walter Curlook Joan Dique Edward L. Donegan Dan Donovan William Wai Hoi Doo William Downe

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Graham Farquharson Patrick Yuk-Bun Fung Blake Goldring Judith Goldring Emily L. Grant Lauran, Bill, Jim, Ted and Donald Guloien Ralph and Roz Halbert Daisy Chiu-Fung Ho Gallant Ho Yiu-Tai Kwok Yuen and Betty Ho Elisabeth Hofmann Richard and Donna Holbrook James D. Hosinec Lynn and Arnold Irwin Sigmund and Nancy Levy Lewis, Oberman, Townley Family & Kimel Family Norman and Gay Loveland David and Jana Lucatch Margaret and Wallace McCain Martha LA McCain Frank and Barbara Milligan Marco Muzzo Anne H. Nethercott Hilary V. Nicholls Martin Ossip Family at the Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto Rose M. Patten The Honourable David Peterson Richard Rooney The Rosiak Family James and Mari Rutka Samuel Lyon Sachs Arthur and Susan Scace C. John Schumacher Linda M. Schuyler Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman T. David Scrymgeour Judith Schurek Isadore and Rosalie Sharp Francis and Eleanor Shen

The University of Toronto’s Three Priorities offer a bold vision for strengthening our role within the city, deepening our global engagement and reach, and rethinking how we prepare our students for leadership in a complex world.

Thanks to your continued support, we will pursue critically important initiatives inspired by these priorities and channel the immense power and talent of our community to imagine a brighter future for our city, our country and our world.

Please visit boundless.utoronto.ca to view an extensive listing of donors who have contributed to the Boundless campaign. On the following pages, we are proud to recognize those benefactors who have made landmark gifts of $1 million or more, those who have contributed to the King’s College Circle Heritage Society and those who have donated $5,000 or more in 2016–17. The University of Toronto is deeply grateful for this support.

Edward and Fran Sonshine Anne E. H. Steacy The Stollery Family Karen and Stuart Tanz Stanley Timoshek William and Phyllis Waters John and Josie Watson Jack Whiteside The Honourable Michael H. Wilson Henry King-cheong Wu John Yaremko Eberhard and Jane Zeidler ­ — Allergan Inc. Alzheimer Society of Ontario Amgen Canada Inc. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Arthur L. Irving Family Foundation Astellas Pharma Canada AstraZeneca Canada Inc. BCE Inc. Bill and Vicky Blair Foundation Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP BMO Financial Group Brookfield Buddhist Education Foundation of Canada Buddhist Youth Alliance International C. D. Howe Memorial Foundation Canadian Chiropractic Research Foundation The Catherine and Fredrik Eaton Charitable Foundation CIBC Colonel Harland Sanders Charitable Organization Inc.

Columbia International College Comcast Corporation Covidien The Daniels Corporation: Mitchell Cohen, Tom Dutton, Jim Aird Davenport Family Foundation Deer Park United Church Digital Specialty Chemicals Ltd. Erin Mills Development Corporation, in memory of Marco Muzzo Explora Research Limited The Friends of the Trinity College Library Goldcorp Incorporated Google Inc. Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Family Foundation Hatch Hellenic Heritage Foundation Helmhorst Investments Ltd. HSBC Bank Canada IAMGOLD Corporation Jackman Foundation The Joe Weider Foundation John C. and Sally Horsfall Eaton Foundation John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation The Korea Foundation The Krembil Foundation The Labatt Family Loblaws Inc. The Lupina Foundation March of Dimes Canada Max and Larry Enkin Foundation McCarthy Tétrault LLP N.S. Robertson Charitable Foundation

Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc. Novo Nordisk Ontario College of Pharmacists Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP The Peter Cundill Foundation The Peterborough K. M. Hunter Charitable Foundation Pfizer Canada Inc. The Purpleville Foundation Radiation Oncologists PMH The Ralph M. Barford Foundation Raymond Chang Foundation The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation The Rossy Family Foundation RTO/ERO Charitable Foundation SciCan Ltd. Scotiabank Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto Sun Life Financial TD Bank Group Teva Canada Limited TMX Group The Toronto Notes for Medical Students Inc. Torys LLP The W. Garfield Weston Foundation University of Toronto Alumni Association Walmart Canada Corp.

Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation The William and Nona Heaslip Foundation 16 Anonymous Donors

ESTATE GIFTS

The University of Toronto recognizes donors whose gifts of $1,000,000 or more were made through realized bequests, trusts or insurance during the campaign.

Jeanne F. E. Armour Grace V. Becker Benjamin Herbert Birstein Dorothy I. M. Black Harald and Jean Bohne Jack H. and Mary E. Clark Madeleine P. Cummins Meyer Jessie Roberts Current Zoltan L. Czagany The Davenport Family Fund Yvonne De Buda Dorothy Jane Metcalf Deane William Annan Dunbar Freda Fejer Beatrice C. Glasier

PE&E Hart Trust Saul Highman Betty Ho M. Isabel Hodgkinson Judith Howard Raymond Jow Miet and Wanda Kamienski Kathleen King Anne Lawson Alice Matheson Elizabeth L. Mathews Ivy M. Maynier J. Edgar McAllister James Samuel McCleary Barbara D. Palmer Dora Burke Playfair

Raymond S. Pryke Clifton Graham Roberts Nathan Roth Joseph L. Rotman Elspie R. Shaver Richard B. and Verna M. Splane Mary B. Stedman James D. Stewart Ethelmae Sweeney Linda Lauren Timbs James Walters Wilma Winkelman George and Isobel B. Winnett Alexandra Maria Yeo 5 Anonymous Donors

Norman and Gay Loveland

Supporting Reconciliation by Supporting Indigenous Students Gay Loveland (BA 1965 Trinity, BEd 1972, MEd 1972) and her husband, Norman Loveland (JD 1972), have donated $1 million to endow bursaries for Indigenous students at the Faculty of Law. “I think supporting Indigenous people in pursuing education is a very important part of the reconciliation process,” says Gay. “I always felt proud of U of T,” adds Norman, a now-retired tax lawyer and former partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. “I was absolutely amazed how intimate, pleasant and terrific the environment was – humble, warm and positive. The Faculty of Law is making every effort to ensure that anybody who has the capacity and the interest and drive to go to law school will not be precluded for lack of money. Gay and I very much wanted to support this effort.”

PHOTO: NICK WONG

KING’S COLLEGE CIRCLE HERITAGE SOCIETY

We are proud to recognize those benefactors who have made a provision for the university through a future bequest or beneficiary of a life insurance or registered retirement fund during the Boundless Campaign.

Liz Addison Margaret Agar Donald C. Ainslie Adeniyi Akanni Janet B. Alderman Douglas Kenneth Laird Allen Roy and Elizabeth Allen Peter Allison and Robin (Hollands) Allison Lillias C. Allward Thomas Alt and Norma Jean Alt Joan Alice Dagmar Andersen Ronald Andrukitis Nathan M. Appel Adele Armin Ann H. Atkinson Christina Attard and Jim Farney Rosemary M. Aubert Douglas Auld Neville Austin Zubin Austin Jehan Bagli John and Claudine Bailey Jon and Martha Baird Niya Bajaj W. Jane Baker Peter W. Baker Everett Corson Barclay Alyson Barnett-Cowan The Bartl Family Peter Bartlett John Baty K. Beckermann Roderick Bell John J. Benedetto Heather Lynn Benson David K. Bernhardt Peter Beynon Catherine Birt Ann Black Bernard and Beverley Blackstien Ronald and Laurie Blainey Justine Blainey-Broker and Blake Broker Robert Boeckner Norah Bolton Diane Hoar Bond and David E. Bond Erwin S. Bonivart Dal Bourne Chris Bovaird and Susanne Jeffery Cindy Bowden William R. Bowen and Sandra J. Gavinchuk The Bowman Family Paul Bowser Bruce Alexander Boyd Sharon and Jim Bradley

John W. Brannigan Diane Bridges Michelle Brotherton and John Rumerfield George and Iris Brown Patrick and Marilyn Brown Suzanne Brown David Brownfield Carolyn and Robert Buchan Nadine A. Buchko Gloria Buckley Walter Buleychuk Brian and Heather Burke Patrick and Elizabeth Burke Kenneth Brian Burnham Bonnie Burstow Eleanor J. Burton Anthony Camisso Patricia F. Campbell Robin Campbell Robert Candido Sally and Peter Cant Muriel M. Spurgeon Carder Barbara Carlton Ellen and Brian Carr K. C. Carruthers Glenn H. Carter Robert W. Cawker Robert A. Centa Kiran Champatsingh Ben Chan Mark A. Cheetham Mary L. Chipman Kirby Chown B. C. Chu Kerrin Churchill Paolo Cini and William V. Leffler Virginia Cirocco Dusan and Maureen Cizman Jennifer A. Clark Gillian Clinton Lawrence R. Cohen Zane and Joan Cohen Penny J. Cole Annalijn Conklin Kris Conrad Brian M. Cornelson Sheila M. Cowan Douglas Crowe Roger A. and Joan F. Cunnington Theresa Cusack Dana Cushing Ariella and Mark Damelin Catherine D’Andrea Raffaello D’Andrea and Leanna Caron Cynthia Dann-Beardsley Janet Davison W. Thomas Delworth and Pamela Osler Delworth Jacqueline Demers

Joseph R. Desloges and Caroline A. Donkin Kathryn and William Dingwall Marco Disipio Janet Donald William J. Dowkes Kristine Drakich David Lloyd Drew Sheilagh Perkins Dubois Melanie Duhamel Maria L. Dyck L. Diane Dyer Debbie Dykes Heinz W. Ecker Jacqueline and Douglas Eisner Anne Ellis and Stephen Sibalis Christopher English Jeffrey and Gilda Ennis Aleksander Andrew Fedko Robert F. J. Feeney Jean (Birkenshaw) Fennell Michael J. Ferguson Dennis Findlay Robert Albert Findlay Pat Fisher Katherine A. Fitzgerald Gary Vincent Fitzgibbon Katrina Florendo Kevin Flynn Patricia Fontana Rose and Leonard Fox Karen Diane and Ian Spencer Fraser Jonathan T. Fried Regine U. Frost Douglas G. Gardner Ann Garnett Diane and Stan Gasner Beverly Ann Gellatly Carl Georgevski Michael Gervers Renay Michele Ghiltzer-Lambert Romanita Ghilzon Riches Barnett and Beverley Giblon Heather V. Gibson John W. Gilbert Carla Gilders and Chris Bartle Clayton Gilders Joseph Giordmaine and Mary Mills Giordmaine Dennis Glasgow and Renate Kozarov Angela Kathleen Gleadall Susan Paterson Glover Merle H. Gobin-Valadez Karen J. Goldenberg Kevin Goldthorp Paul W. Gooch

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Eleanor Gooday Fred K. Graham Doug Green Barbara A. Greer Ralph and Caroline Grose George Gross Irene M. Guilford and Nigel G. H. Guilford Richard W. Guisso Patrick Gullane Helen Gurney J. Hamblin Preeya, Rachel and Ulrich Hanke Norm and Nellie Hann Samuel J. Hanna Patricia Hannah Wendy Hannam Victor Harding Nancy E. Hardy Michael Hare James Ernest Harlick Barbara Donna Harris Terry G. Harris Elizabeth D. Harvey Kim and Alex Heath Jenny Heathcote Freia (Nee Kaiser) and John A. Heber Barbara J. Heggie Catherine W. Hellyer Dianne W. Henderson Kenneth Henwood Jean and Richard Herbert Murray and Roslyn Herst Michael Heydon Andy J. Higgins K. Betty Hill Peter and Verity Hobbs Nettie (Wilson) Hoffman Theo and Doris Hofmann Warren R. Holder Audrey M. Homewood Dorothy (Flannery) Horwood James D. Hosinec Gilbert E. Howey Carol Hudson and Tim Glutek Matt Hughes J. Anne C. Hume Amir I. Hussain John Ibbitson

Donald C. Ingram Margaret Ionson Lois (Linstead) Irvine Nathan Isaacs Clare E. Jacques-Shields Karl Jaffary Lynda Jenner Angela Jerath and Jason Wong Alexandra F. Johnston Monika H. Johnston Elaine and Sidney Kadish Gerald Kates John and Karen Kaufman Paul Keery Alexandra Kelly James D. Kemp Jamie Ker Sarah A. Ker-Hornell Andrea Kerr Kathryn Kersey Robin Kester-Martin Janet E. Kim Jodi and Michael Kimm Donald L. King Madeleine Kneider Terry Knight E. (Liz) Kobluk Maria Ottilia Koel Richard S. Kollins Marie Korey Bala P. Krishnan and Karnika B. Krishnan Stephen Kurtz and Sheila Weisinger Kurtz James Lacombe Michael and Sophie Lagopoulos Robert and Carolyn Lake Brad Langford Maryam Latifpoor and Vladas Keparoutis Grace Lau Warren C. Law Ross Douglas Lawrence Jim Lawson Julie Y. Lee Kirk A. Lee K.P. Lefebvre Steve and Lisa Lemon Laura and Guilio Lepschy Renee Levcovitch-McHale Jill L. Levenson

Susan Grimshaw Levesque Beverley Butler Lewis Leanne and George Lewis Peter N. Lewis Donna Lightfoot Marjorie and Roy Linden James W. Lindsay Peter B. Loebel John Lorinc and Victoria Ann Foote Edith Louie Ken and Judy Luginbuhl Teza Layos Lwin Jacquelyn R. MacCoon Burton MacDonald and Rosemarie Sampson Byron MacDonald John W. MacDonald Lorna MacDonald Shannon L. MacInnes George A. Mackie Catherine Y. MacKinnon Linda E. MacRae Dennis W. Magill Paul Manners Alan M. Marcus Laurie L. Marsan Anne Martin Sandra M. Martin Wanda Matuszkiewicz Keith and Pamela McCallum Ian McCausland Ann McConnell Douglas Emerson McDougall Sybil Anne McEnteer Joseph Patrick McGee Ross McKean and Mark G. Merryfield Joyce A. (Morley) McLean Donald W. McLeod Chris McNaught Sylvia M. McPhee Dorothy McRobb Michael McSorley Jennifer Laura Meiorin-Schumacher Janice White Melendez Michael Menzinger Gilbert Meyer Croft Michaelson Hymie and Roslyn Mida

TRANSFORMATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONAL GIVING GIVING

STUDENT SUPPORT $344 million for student scholarships

74 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

FACULTY SUPPORT $227 million for chairs and professorships

Bruce M. Millar Hensley Miller Virginia Miller Sigmund and Elaine Mintz Alec Monro William and Angela Moreau Brent Morrison Christian Mueller Dr. Janice Mummery A. June Murdoch Jack and Giovanna Nagao Mary Neal and Stan Neal Carolyn Oliver Neal Anne (Templeton) Nethercott Elaine Nielsen David C. Nimmo James Norcop Margaret and Wallace McCain Carol D. Nunn Jean O’ Grady Naomi J. Oliphant Mariel O’Neill-Karch and Pierre Karch Michelle M. B. and Richard Osborne David Ouchterlony Charles Pachter Michael Page and Patricia DeSales-Page Robert and Dorothea Painter Andrew Pakula Anne Marie Paradis-Carr Alexander C. Pathy Robert (Bud) Patrick Ann Patterson Roger and Marjorie Pelham C. Elaine Penalagan Winsor and Ruth Ann Pepall Jim and Marion Pierce Rhea Plosker and Michael Carter S. Walker Popplewell James Posluns Terry Pratt Carolyn Purden Anthony M. Erik Quackenbush Anita R. Rachlis Val Rachilis and Anita Rachlis

RESEARCH AND INNOVATION $759 million for groundbreaking centres, initiatives and programs, and $377 million in philanthropic research grants

Judith Ransom Peter A. Reich Elizabeth A. Reid W. Darlene Reid Marjorie Lavers Reynolds Janice J. Rickerby Mark D. Riczu Lesley Riedstra and Rian Mitra Roger Riendeau George and Jennifer Rigg Paul E. Riley Michaele M. Robertson Diane P. Rogers Peter A. Rogers Patricia Romans J. Barbara Rose Gary William Ross Paul Russell Peter H. Russell Ann Saddlemyer Donald and Joni Saunders Roger M. Savory Karen A. Scherl Norman Schipper J. Glenn Henderson Scott George and Christina Senkiw Ray and Sue Shady G. Stephen Shantz Harvey and Nirmala Shear David P. Silcox Meredith and Malcolm Silver Phillip Simmons and Louvain Piggott Sonja Sinclair Pat and Pekka Sinervo Peter Slemon Ann M. Smith Diane J. Smith Hugh Snyder Marion Elizabeth Snyder Mickey and Annette Convey Spillane Paul Grant Stanwood Eric Staples Catriona M. Steele Alison Stirling Peter A. Stollery M. Stratten Ann and Ross Stuart Janet Stubbs

CAPITAL PROJECTS $569 million for critical infrastructure projects

H. Leonard and Pam Sussman Colin J. Swift W. John Switzer David Szollosy and Lauretta Amundsen Susanne Tabur Carol A. Tait Terry Tedesco Linda and Eimie Tekutis Terrill Theman Hayden Thomas and Trudy Sopp Catherine F. Thompson Doris A. Thompson Frederick J. Thorpe E. Joan Tilt Rodrick Toms David Tong Bernard A. Torbik Margaret Torrance Marilyn Toth Ann E. Tottenham A. S. J. Tozer Paul Tozer Frank and Joanne Turner Joy Tyndall W. Tynkaluk Paula Vainio-Paunic Theodore van der Veen Michael J. Villeneuve Paula M. Vine Scott Brynn Vloet Walter Vogl Joanne Waddington Don Wakefield Ron Wakelin F. Michael and Virginia Walsh Lori Walters and Roald Nasgaard Barbara Warren Arthur Waters Phyllis and William Waters Nancy Watson Tom Watt Jayne Webb-Piszel James W. Webster Merike Weiler William Westfall David George Whitehead John D. Whittall Marni and Roland Wieshofer Stephen and Rachel Williams Nancy J. Williamson Marjorie A. Wilson Ron Wilson John Winder Joan Winearls Mary P. Winsor Pauline Joan Winstanley Ian Witterick John Timothy Wixted Jason Wong Lydia Wong Nelson Wong Gerald Wright Kim Wright Rachel Feinrip Xintaris and Constantine Xintaris Jay Okun Yedvab Wayne Douglas Yetman John and Betty Youson Wendy Zufelt-Baxter 162 Anonymous Donors

ANNUAL DONORS – 2016/17

Our annual donor listing recognizes the generosity of donors who have made new gifts or pledges to the University of Toronto of $5,000 or more between May 1, 2016, and April 30, 2017. $10,000,000 OR MORE

Terrence Donnelly 1 Anonymous Donor $5,000,000 TO $9,999,999

Government of Japan Mastercard Foundation Orlando Corporation 1 Anonymous Donor $1,000,000 TO $4,999,999

Anson Chan William Wai Hoi Doo Emily L. Grant James D. Hosinec Joannah and Brian Lawson Sigmund and Nancy Levy Norman and Gay Loveland The Honourable Michael H. Wilson — Astellas Pharma Canada Bill and Vicky Blair Foundation Comcast Corporation Digital Specialty Chemicals Ltd. The Lupina Foundation The Peterborough K. M. Hunter Charitable Foundation The Ralph M. Barford Foundation Raymond Chang Foundation RBC Foundation TD Bank Group 3 Anonymous Donors $100,000 TO $999,999

Clive and Barbara Allen Keng Lam Ang Isabel (Overton) and Alfred Bader John and Mary Cassaday Richard M. Clarke Adam Clerici, Ashley Clerici and Yianni Soumalias James W. Davie Haig Farris Henry Farrugia Reza Fazeli T. C. Fong Christopher Forrest Annette Harhay Helios Hernandez Lorne Heuckroth Richard and Donna Holbrook James and Heather Hunter

PHOTO: COURTESY LORNE HEUCKROTH

The Honourable Henry N. R. Jackman P. Thomas Jenkins Nicolas Kordellas and Shirley V. Tripp John Lederer Stephen D. Lister and Margaret Rundle Joseph and Frances Macerollo John and Aileen McGrath John Peri Carol S. Perry Olga L. Pugliese Susan G. Rappolt Robert A. Roberts T. David Scrymgeour Ivo and Milly Syptak Mehrdad Tamadonfar Karen and Stuart Tanz Lynn Tomkins Nancy Tomlinson William and Kathleen Troost Edward T. Unger Ron Walbank F. Michael and D. Virginia Walsh John and April (Kono) Watt Richard Wong and Fei-Fei Liu Eberhard and Jane Zeidler — A. K. Prakash Foundation Alberta Pulse Growers Allen Family Trust Allergan Inc. Alphora Research Inc. Amazon Research Awards ATCO Group Canadian Chiropractic Research Foundation Covidien Deming Education Investment Co. Ltd. The Di Marco Family Foundation Edwards Charitable Foundation Evergreen Education Foundation FORREC Ltd. George Callahan Foundation The Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation Gluskin Sheff + Associates Inc. Google Inc. Hariri Pontarini Architects Hatch IAMGOLD Corporation Istuary Innovation Group Jackman Foundation

Johnson & Johnson Kijiji Canada Koffler Investments Corporation The KPMG Foundation Kylemore Communities The Lawrence and Judith Tanenbaum Family Foundation Legal Aid Ontario The Loch Hame Foundation Maurice Cody Research Trust Max and Larry Enkin Foundation The Maytree Foundation Medical Pharmacies Group Limited Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan) N.S. Robertson Charitable Foundation The Naim S. Mahlab Foundation The Nordic Council Novartis Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc. NVIDIA Ontario Good Roads Association (OGRA) PearTree Financial Services Ltd. Perkins+Will Canada The Peter and Melanie Munk Charitable Foundation PricewaterhouseCoopers Radiation Oncologists PMH Residential & Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario Rich Great International Industries Limited Royal Bank Financial Group Foundation Texas Instruments Incorporated The Toronto General & Western Hospital Foundation The Toronto Notes for Medical Students Inc. University of Toronto Engineering Society The Ward Family Foundation 15 Anonymous Donors $25,000 TO $99,999

Brent Allen Mark and May Allison Nouman Ashraf W. Geoffrey Beattie

Lorne Heuckroth A World of Experience After a dynamic career travelling the world in the field of international development, Lorne Heuckroth (BASc 1958, MASc 1960, PhD 1964) is creating opportunities for others to cross borders too. His gift of $525,000 has established scholarships for students from developing countries to study for their master’s degrees at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. Heuckroth worked on development projects in Afghanistan (where he founded the Kabul University Earthquake Research Centre), Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania and Russia. “I learned so much about people and cultures, macro and microeconomics, and geopolitics at perhaps one of the tensest times in modern history,” he says. “I am lucky to have witnessed this and want to give future generations the opportunity to do the same.”

Paul and Kaye Beeston H. Bernice Bell David K. Bernhardt Robi and Ruth Blumenstein Paul V. Blusys David G. Broadhurst Charles W. Brown Mitchell H. Brown Velda Brown Bonnie Burstow Margaret Harriett Cameron Robin Campbell Glenn H. Carter John and Margaret Catto Robert Centa William Charnetski and Tracey-Anne Pearce Patanjali Chary and Jasminder Kaur Robert and Andrea Chisholm Alexander and Saralee Christ Grace Y. K. Chum Paolo Cini and William Leffler Fergus Clydesdale Alexandre Cohen Brian C. Collyer David Crawford and Julia Holland Andrew and Hillary Cumming Joy M. Cunningham Marcelo Cypel Dan Donovan Bill Dowkes Anne W. Dupré

John E. Engeland Mohamad Fakih Tye S. Farrow Jonathan and Shlomit Feldman Peter Charles Ferguson Edward H. Fife J. Chris Fisher Nicholas Forbath and Anne B. Kenshole The Forman Family Norman Fraser Michael Gervers Garth M. Girvan Kevin A. Glass Robert Gordon Glover Sandra Forbes and Stephen Grant Eric and Karen Green Mike Guinness Helen Gurney Wendy G. Hannam Hart and Brigitte Hanson Penny and Bill Harris Renee Haugerud Richard G. Hegele Dianne W. Henderson Ngai Hoi and Susan Cheung Victoria Hurlihey Montieth Illingworth Morimitsu and Etsu Inaba Frederic L. R. (Eric) Jackman Maruja Jackman Clare E. Jacques-Shields C. Douglas Jay Harold Kalant Miriam Kaufman Melissa Kennedy

Bruce Kidd Kimel Family Marie Korey Raymond P. Kruck Joseph Lebovic Mart Liinve Craig A. Lowery Leo D. Luk and Cecilia Luk H. Ian and Dorothy Macdonald Kerrie MacPherson David Malkin Mark G Malkin Terry Maloney John and Melinda Mayhall J. A. (Sandy) McIntyre Dorothy McRobb The Menkes Family Michael and Janet Norris Bohdan S. Onyschuk Martin Ossip Family at the Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto Parnoja Family Marisa Pavone James A. Peers Helene Polatajko John Portelli Richard B. Potter Terry Promane Monique Rabideau and Arthur Bode Paul Rainsberry Joan R. Randall Gail Regan Roscoe Reid Graham Mrs. Jack Reynolds Douglas Richards E. A. Robinson Martha Rogers

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superkül Tel Aviv University Toronto Academic Vascular Specialists Toronto Sport & Social Club Undergraduate Pharmacy Society University of Toronto Scarborough Alumni Association (UTSCAA) Vancouver Foundation Varsity Leadership Foundation Wellington Financial LP Whitmer Trudel Charitable Foundation The William and Nona Heaslip Foundation The Wolf Lebovic Charitable Foundation 15 Anonymous Donors

Stefan Podsiadlo

A Generation of Unmatched Givers During the Second World War, Stefan Podsiadlo was imprisoned by the Soviet secret police, then fought for the Allies in the Italian Campaign. Now, he and the veterans of the Polish Second Corps of the Eighth Army are giving yet again – this time a cheque for $50,000 presented to the Polish language and literature program at U of T. The gift is part of communal fundraising efforts organized by the Council of the Canadian-Polish Congress for the Support of Polish Studies. “Four generations owe peace, freedom and prosperity to these men and their brothers-in-arms,” says Tamara Trojanowska, director of the program. “Theirs is a generation of truly unmatched givers.”

The Emmanuel Romain Family In Honour of Walter Roschlau Barrie D. Rose, Karen Solomon and Family Linda Rothstein Shaifali Sandal Cherla and Ratna Sastry David and Susan Scandiffio Pushpa Seth and Sushila Naran Pancha Molly Shoichet Nan Shuttleworth P. C. and Sharron Stangeby Tom and Marilyn Sutton Kenji Tamaoki Kenny Tan Mark H. Tan Joseph and Marcella Tanzola James Temerty Lorne Tepperman Abel M. Tesfaye Nevil Thomas Stephen S. Tobe Evelyn Mary Tomlinson Mark Toulouse Anne Urbancic Tom and Lisa Waddell Frederic A. Waks John and Josie Watson J. Peter Williams John W. L. Winder Elizabeth S. Woodford Victor Y. Xin Kazuhiro Yasufuku Marina Yoshida — Abbvie Corporation Alcon Canada Inc. Alectra Inc. Alion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Amgen Canada Inc.

AMS Inc. Andrew Pierre Medicine Professional Corporation ApoPharma Inc. Arthur & Audrey Cutten Foundation AstraZeneca Canada Inc. Bayer Inc. Canada The Biggar-Hedges Foundation Blackwell Structural Engineers BMO Financial Group C. L. Burton Trusts CAN Fund (Canadian Athletes Now) Canadian Dental Protective Association Canadian Friends of Finland Education Foundation Canadian Jewish News Fund Canadian Tax Foundation Channel Foundation Chemtrade Christakis Arenson Medicine Professional Corporation Cisco Systems Inc Cook (Canada) Inc. The D. H. Gordon Foundation Daisy Intelligence DePuy Synthes EmergiTel Enwave Energy Corporation ERA Architects Inc. ERCO Worldwide Facebook Canada Finnish National Agency for Education

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The Friends of the Trinity College Library General Mills Inc. Georgian Partners The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Hal Jackman Foundation Hiller 2007 Charitable Remainder Unitrust Horatio Alger Association of Canada HSA Foundation Humane Medicine Inc. International Association for Energy Economics Iona Anetta Rabjohns Living Trust The Ireland Fund of Canada J&L Rogers Family Charitable Foundation James H. Cummings Foundation Janet Rosenberg & Studio Inc. The Joseph Lebovic Charitable Foundation The Kenneth M. Molson Foundation Kettlebeck Developments Knowledge First Foundation KPMB Architects KPMG LLP KSV Advisory Inc. Later Life Learning The Mark Daniels and Andrea WeissmanDaniels Charitable Foundation The McLean Foundation Metabacus Inc. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Mohammad H. Mohseni Charitable Foundation Montgomery Sisam Architects Inc. Mount Sinai Hospital – Obstetrics & Gynecology Nancy Salmon Scholarship Fund at the Community Foundation of Mississauga Nokia Oyj The Norman and Margaret Jewison Charitable Foundation North Toronto Soccer Club Nutowima Ltd. Ontario Professional Engineers – Foundation for Education The Ontario Provincial Synod Power Corporation of Canada R. P. Bratty Charitable Foundation R. L. Solutions The Ruth E. and Dr. William Hy Ross Foundation The Salamander Foundation Samuel J. & Jean Sable Family Endowment Fund Scotiabank Silicon Valley Community Foundation St. Michael’s Medical Imaging Consultants Stepping-stone Foundation Stryker Canada Students’ Administrative Council of the U of T Sunnybrook Radiation Oncology Association

$10,000 TO $24,999

Nael Al Koudsi John and Claudine Bailey Marilyn and Charles Baillie Elizabeth Baird Richard J. Balfour Steven Ballan Keith M. Barron Brenda Beck Richard Bedell Rob and Sky Bicevskis Monica Biringer and David Moritsugu Erwin S. Bonivart Harvey Botting Harold H. Braaksma William J. Braithwaite Allon Bross Craig Brown Viola Butler Peter and Sally Cant Brian R. Carr Wendy M. Cecil Steve Chapman Priscilla Ching Chung Ian D. Clark Earlaine Collins Michael P. Collins Graham B. R. Collis Tony Comper Sheila Connell Ken Crofoot David H. Crook Amrita Daniere Tim Danson Gail Darling Bryan P. Davies and Andra Takacs Marc de Perrot Kalowatie Deonandan Raywat S. Deonandan Simone Desilets William J. DesLauriers Janet Dewan Kristine Drakich B. Elan Dresher Glenna Duff Dino Dutra George A. Elliott Ronald Factor and Delmarie Scherloski George A. Fierheller Catherine Y. Gagne

Suzanne Gayn Meric and Joanna Gertler June Gordon Cyril and Diane Grasso Mary C. Ham W. Jason Hanson Ruth Emilie Hayhoe Anne Hersh James D. Hinds Heather J. Hiscox Simon A. Houston Ernest Howard Trinity Jackman Sidney M. and Elaine Kadish William and Hiroko Keith Arthur P. Kennedy Mary E. Kirton Kyra A. Kristensen-Irvine Eva Kushner Marcus Law Ross D. Lawrence Michael Chen-Teng Lee Theresa June Li Roy and Marjorie Linden Larry Lowenstein and Nina Lester Douglas N. Lunau Gail MacNaughton Paul Robert Magocsi Coral and William Martin Massie Family Barry and Rose McInerney E. R. S. McLaughlin John L. McLaughlin Delia M. Moog Sanjib and Bharati (Bee-Bee) Mukherjee Molly Naber-Sykes Hilary V. Nicholls James Norcop Mariel O’Neill-Karch and Pierre Karch Marion and Earl Orser Hilary Pearson and Michael John Sabia John R. and Maire E. Percy Nicolas Phan John H. and Catherine F. Phillips Paul and Patricia Phoenix Dale R. Ponder Randall Pratt Paul Rappolt Anita and Chandran Ratnaswami Flavia C. Redelmeier William Robins and Anne Christie Helen W. Robinson Anthony P. Rolph J. Barbara Rose Norine L. Rose Tracy P. Rossi Michael and Sheila Royce Annette Sanger and James Kippen William and Meredith Saunderson Michael D. Sherar Anne R. Schlarp Alex and Irina Shubat Eric and Marsha Slavens Roy P. Smith Richard Sommer and Laura Miller Epp Sonin

PHOTO: JACKIE SHAPIRO

Suzanne Sousan John C. and Ellen Spears Cathy Spoel Gary E. Stein Adam M. Steinberg Janice Stevens David L Swail Jessica Rankine Swail Carol Swallow James Swan Ann Marie Sweeney Mahsima Tavoosi-Monfared Steven Tennyson Ravindran Thuraisingham Valerie Tung and Gulshan Singh Bert Wasmund Ruth Watts-Gransden Mary F. Williamson Pauline Joan Winstanley John and Anne Witt Margaret Zeidler David H. Zemans Katherine Zettle — 1807150 Ontario Inc. 7744161 Canada Ltd. (Affordable Creations) 8090726 Canada Inc. Abbott Laboratories Limited Adobe Systems Incorporated Alex and Ruth Dworkin Tolerance Fund Alexion Pharma Canada Corp.

AMO Canada Company

Aqueduct Foundation Arts & Science Students’ Union Association of Part-Time Undergraduate Students at the University of Toronto Bayer Bereskin & Parr LLP Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd. Borden Ladner Gervais LLP Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Group Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation Toronto, Canada Buddhist Education Foundation of Canada Burroughs Wellcome Fund Campbell Soup Company Ltd. Canadian Hospital Specialties Ltd. Canadian Sugar Institute CIBC CN Coca-Cola Bottling Company Colliers Macaulay Nicolls Inc. CS&P Architects Dairy Farmers of Canada Danone Inc. Dare Foods Limited Donner Canadian Foundation

Elliott and Rina Rosenberg Charitable Foundation Epstein Cole LLP Federation of Chinese Canadian Professionals (Ontario) Education Foundation Florence Margaret Thompson Charitable Foundation Fo Guang Shan Temple Friedberg Charitable Foundation General Mills Canada Inc. Gilead Sciences Canada, Inc. The Henry White Kinnear Foundation The Hope Charitable Foundation Hospital for Sick Children – Department of Surgery Howie Family Fund IBM Canada Ltd. Ingredion J. P. Bickell Foundation Janssen Inc. Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust The Joan and Clifford Hatch Foundation John and Helen Timo Foundation Katedra Foundation Konrad Group The Langar Foundation LEA Consulting Ltd.

Mohamad Fakih

Manulife Mawer Investment Management Ltd. Mead Johnson Nutritionals Merck Canada Inc. Mount Sinai Hospital – Department of Medicine Research Fund Nestle Nicol Family Foundation OMERS Ontario Association of Landscape Architects The Peter and Eleanor Daniels Charitable Foundation The Peter Cundill Foundation Private Giving Foundation Quaker Tropicana Gatorade Canada Inc. Qualcomm Incorporated The Rossy Family Foundation The Shen Family Charitable Foundation Sherrard Kuzz LLP Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital Stikeman Elliott LLP T. G. H. Plastic Surgery Associates Tartu College UCB Canada Inc. UJA Federation of Greater Toronto Unilever Canada Inc. University of Toronto Alumni Association University of Toronto Faculty Association VWA Viewpoint Foundation The W. Garfield Weston Foundation Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation Women’s Musical Club of Toronto Foundation Woodsworth College Students’ Association The Youssef-Warren Foundation Zak Company for Engineering & Trading 34 Anonymous Donors $5,000 TO $9,999

Thinking Globally, Supporting Future Leaders Pushed out of Lebanon by war, Mohamad Fakih immigrated to Canada in 1999, working for free in the day to gain experience and at night in a coffee shop.

Now the president and CEO of Paramount Fine Foods, a Lebanese restaurant chain, Fakih has donated $50,000 to U of T Scarborough. These funds will help expand enrolment, improve accessibility and add much-needed meeting rooms and tutorial spaces to Highland Hall – supporting students the way UTSC had supported Fakih. “We want to show that an immigrant Canadian company could compete anywhere in the world,” says Fakih, who was recognized as the 2016 Business Leader of the Year by the Toronto Region Board of Trade. “Part of the company’s mission is working with the next generation. I want to provide conditions where they can become the leaders of tomorrow.”

PHOTO: CANDACE MAY/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Mohammad Al Zaibak Hussein A. Al-Dhalaan Ammar Al-Joundi Richard Alway Jamie and Patsy Anderson Terry S. Axelrod David J. Backstein John Bajc Deborah Barbour Joanne M. Bargman Kristopher P. Bassi Lisa M. Bate David E. Bawden Alan M. Beaton Karen M. Beckermann Thomas A. B. Bell Roland and Marie Bertin Shlomo Bibas

Sergiy Bilenky John N. and Miranda Birch Harris J. Bixler Justine Elizabeth Blainey-Broker Walter M. and Lisa Balfour Bowen Lidia Brandes Margaret A. Brennan Mary T. Brennan Meyer Brownstone Gloria Buckley James Burn Donald Buschlen George and Martha Butterfield Joy D. Calkin Hugh Cameron Allan I. Carswell Joan D. Catterson Jas Chahal Douglas Chau Howell Chickering David and Valerie Christie Michael Church Terence Clarkson and Cornelis van de Graaf Christine M. Clement William J. Corcoran Robert and Phyllis Couzin Robert Crnkovich Michael B. Cruickshank Laurence Curtis Terence Dalgleish J. Rod Davey George and Katherine Dembroski Gerald and Irene Devlin Diestel Family Nicholas R. DiGiuseppe Lynn Dnieper Neil and Susan Dobbs James Dryburgh Roman Dubczak Teresa M. Dufort Jean Patterson Edwards Freda M. Eickmeyer Ambrose Fan Mike Fattori and Debora Pearson Catriona Clark Ferguson Imad Ferzli John C. Field The Filinski Family Joel Finkelstein Michael G. Finlayson Alison A. Fisher Michael H. Ford Georgiana Forguson William F. Francis J. Barry French Nicole Frew Rajiv Gandhi Sharon C. Geraghty Heather V. Gibson Greg Gilhooly Elinor Gill Ratcliffe Joseph and Mary Giordmaine Ross Girvan Edward J. Glover Valerie Godsoe Jennings Jeffrey Gollish John and Mary Goodwin Ronald W. Gough

Patrick and Freda Hart Green Susan E. Grimshaw-Levesque Douglas Hamilton J. Sheldon Hamilton William B. Hanna Richard F. Haskayne Toni and Robin Healey Paul T. Hellyer Patrick Henry Lauri and Jean Hiivala Sharifa Himidan Michael Hollend Clay Horner Joyce B. Houlden Patricia L. Houston Shirley Hoy Janet (Saddington) Hunter Brian Hurd Nathan Isaacs D. Anna Jarvis Richard Jenkinson Joseph Jones Wendy A. Kane John A. Kazanjian Robert J Keenan Carolyn Keystone Hassan Khosrowshahi Peter and Tatjana Klavora Frances Kortschot Hans J. Kreder Horace Krever William Kuzon Paul Kuzyk Christian Lassonde Johnny Lau John Lazarou John D. (Jack) Leitch Michael Lemole Robert Levit George and Leanne Lewis Stephen J. Lewis John Voss and June Li Robert E. Lord Mary K. Lowy Anne Luyat Janet (Macrae) MacInnis Donald M. MacLeod Nizar N. Mahomed Anuj Malhotra Jess and Kerry Mann Alan Marcus K. Wayne Marshall Rocco L. Martino Elizabeth Mason Wanda H. Matuszkiewicz Philip Maude Martha LA McCain Christopher McCulloch Matthew Donald Mcinnes R. Peter and Virginia McLaughlin Mark McLean Robin S. McLeod Kelly E. Meighen Rael Merson Tom Mihalik Irene R. Miller Janet E. Minor Brian Miron and Monica Vegelj Carole R. Moore Mayo Moran Dennis J. Murphy

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Alastair and Jennifer Murray Chris Murray Stephen Murray Diane Nam Sarabjit Neelam David and Mary (Bosworth) Neelands Neil Nisker Gerald R. Noble The Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain Markku Tapani Nousiainen John D. Novak James A. (Tim) and Mary A. O’Brien Louis L. Odette Paul H. M. O’Donoghue Darrell Ogilvie-Harris and Louise Tremblay M. Andrew and J. K. Patricia Padmos Jocelyn Palm David and Bernadette Palmer Alan V. Parish Brian Taewon Park Andrew J. Patenall John and Janet Paterson Alexander C. Pathy John and Thea Patterson Eamonn Percy David Powell Christine J. Prudham Y. Raja Rampersaud Marg Rappolt David Rayside Robin R. Richards Kathryn and David Richardson Ian and Nancy Robinson Shauna Rolston and Andrew Shaw Ellen B. Roseman Gary William Ross Sandra and Joseph Rotman Ian Rowe Tristan T. Roy Ronald E. Ruest Oleg Safir Michael J. Salamon and Tracy Pryce Rustom and Zarina Satchu Longinia Sauro Pauline M. Scott Victor M. Seabrook Harry and Lillian Seymour Judith Fox-Shapero Helen Elizabeth Shaw Charlotte M. Sheasby-Coleman Jessica Shelley Donald E. Short Barbara Shum and Manos Vourkoutiotis Ronald and Anne Sidon Lynne Sigler Patricia J.S. (Hand) Simpson Carolyn Jean (Werry) Sinclair MacGregor David Sinclair Sonja Sinclair Pat and Pekka Sinervo Susan Smart

Ken and Gail Smith (Bozek) Herbert Staneland Valerie F. Stavro David Stephen Margaret and Andrew Stephens John and Barbara Switzer Khalid Syed Andrew J. Szonyi Nabil Tadros Anne Tait Barbara E. Tangney Almos Tassonyi and Maureen Simpson Douglas and Dana Taylor Karel and Yoka TerBrugge Eira M. Thomas Timothy Thompson Richard Iorweth Thorman Yuan Tian David O. Tinker William G. Todd J. Michael and Naomi Tomczak Stefan Tomescu Paul Tozer Olev Trass Enping Tu Frank J. Turner John H. and Diana F. Tuttle Avanindra Utukuri Danh Van Le & Tinh-Chau Nguyen Christian J. Veillette Alan Vihant Linda M. von Schalburg Veronica M. Wadey Joyce and William Wallace Paul B. Walters David N. Wasserstein Mark K. Wax Jeffrey Wendling Brian C. Westlake Edward B. White Donald and Gloria Wiebe Amy-Lynne Williams M. H. Franco Wong Rebecca Wong Shun Wong Craig Wright Jay S. Wunder Phyllis N. Yaffe Albert Yee Peter L. Yung Karl Zabjek — 0927612 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company A. Harmantas Medicine Professional Corporation ACTRA Bell Canada Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP Braemar College Inc. Canadian Polish Millennium Fund Canadian Union of Public Employees Constant Change Media Group Inc. (Virtual Reality Toronto) COOK The CSL Group Inc.

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Destiny Solutions Inc. Dominican Friars of Toronto Eli Lilly Canada Inc. Endologix, Inc. Enterprise Holdings Fiera Foods Company First Generation Capital Inc. Flora Morrison Research Fund at the Toronto Foundation Fran & Edmund Clark Foundation Fred Cass Professional Corporation Gazzola Paving Limited Generation Capital Great Plyer Inc. Greenfield Global The HIDI Group HydraTek & Associates Inc. Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) Investments Unlimited J.E. Panneton Family Foundation Janet E. Hutchison Foundation The Legresley Family Foundation LHM Dental Studios Long & McQuade Musical Instruments Loon Call Communities Inc. McKesson Retail Banner Services, IDA / Guardian Medtronic of Canada Moses & Temara Tobe Foundation The Northup/Lawson Memorial Trust Fund Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP Oakville Guild C. O. C. Ontario Association of Architects Pfizer Canada Inc. Pizza Pizza Limited Practical Electric Contracting Inc. Pulse Crops (Canada) Association Roi Corporation The Ryckman Trust Scarborough Campus Student Union Sherman Foundation Shim Sutcliffe Architects Shoppers Drug Mart/ Pharmaprix Life Foundation Toronto Crown and Bridge Study Club Toronto Hydro Corporation Transcontinental Inc. The United Church of Canada Foundation Valeant Canada LP W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. Wardle Daley Bernstein Bieber LLP 36 Anonymous Donors

Lesley Riedstra and Rian Mitra

Sharing their Love for a Beautiful Campus When Lesley Riedstra (BA 1995 New College) and Rian Mitra (BSc 1997 New College) heard about U of T’s Landmark Project, they wanted to be the first to help the effort to green the downtown campus core and reclaim it for pedestrians. The couple, who met at New College and are active alumni volunteers, have made a gift of $10,000 that will be recognized on a commemorative bench. They are also spearheading an alumni campaign to raise funds for a New College garden. “The opportunity to make these areas even better versions of themselves is once in a lifetime,” says Riedstra.

“U of T is something you carry with you through your life. It’s our campus.

It’s our space. This is our opportunity to leave a mark on it.”

ESTATE GIFTS

The University of Toronto recognizes donors whose gifts were made through realized bequests, trusts or insurance between May 1, 2016, and April 30, 2017.

Allen Family Trust James Melville Armstrong Harold Attin Antonina N. Balciunas Margaret H. Bedell Benjamin Herbert Birstein Dorothy I. M. Black Constance Mary Blewett Harald and Jean Bohne Marjorie Bolton Douglas Booz William Brown Boyd Ernest A. Bradshaw Reuben Brant Patricia Kay Brodie George Brough Robert Bruce C. L. Burton Trusts Alice M. Buscombe William C. Buttimer Yvonne M. Calver Evelyn May Capron James Carscallen Samuel Castrilli Harry Tycer Cherry Maurice Cody Research Trust Kenneth B. Conn Kenneth G. Coward Elizabeth Crawford William Douglas Crone Zoltan L. Czagany The Davenport Family Fund Kathleen Frances Dean in memory of my daughter, the late Carallyn Dean

Vasilios Dross William Annan Dunbar John W. Duncanson Muriel L. Dupuis Dennis Wilfred Elo Margaret E. Emmerson Fred C. Farr John Charles Fields Thomas F. Foster Donald H. Francis Jocelyn A. Fullerton Jerry Gerow Jean Glasgow Beatrice C. Glasier Charles Pasquale Grimaldi Jack C. Hallam Ruth F. Hammond John D. Harbron Joan E. and Donald C. Harrison PE&E Hart Trust In memory of my late wife, Mary Hazeland F. David Hoeniger Velma and Robert Howie Audrey Hozack Bill Huycke Kenneth W. Inkster Irene Jeryn F. Ross Johnson Katharyn Jefferies Karrys Leon Katz Hyacinth Chin Sang Kidman Crad Kilodney Kathleen King June A. Laking John V. Lawer

Gerald J. A. Leahy Reuben Wells Leonard Margaret Jean Leppington Alexander E. MacDonald J. Edgar McAllister Mary F. McCrimmon Donald McKerron William C. Michell Keith Moles Northup/Lawson Memorial Trust Fund D. F. O’Leary Jon R. Pearce Frances Phoenix Savitri Purshottam Manuel E. Pusitz Iona Anetta Rabjohns James H. Rattray Memorial Trust Margaret Agnes Runciman The Ryckman Trust Paul S. Schaffer William Sharpe Marjorie E. Simonds Donald Smith John Spitzer Anne C.M. Starr Mary B. Stedman James D. Stewart Sunny Stewart Reginald Stiff Mary Tschappat Esta M. Wall Bruce P. Wallace William Guy Walton Wilma Winkelman 17 Anonymous Donors

KING’S COLLEGE CIRCLE HERITAGE SOCIETY

GIFTS-IN-KIND

The King’s College Circle Heritage Society recognizes and honours alumni and friends who have thoughtfully made a provision for the university through a future bequest, life insurance or trust gift between May 1, 2016, and April 30, 2017.

Ann H. Atkinson Neville Austin Jon and Martha Baird Peter W. Baker John J. Benedetto John W Brannigan Diane Bridges Gloria Buckley Paolo Cini and William V. Leffler Gillian Clinton Theresa Cusack Kathryn and William Dingwall John W. Gilbert Kevin Goldthorp Elizabeth D. Harvey Catherine W. Hellyer Jean and Richard Herbert Murray and Roslyn Herst Donald C. Ingram

Lois (Linstead) Irvine Angela Jerath and Jason Wong Monika H. Johnston John and Karen Kaufman Andrea Kerr Robin Kester-Martin Donald L. King E (Liz) Kobluk Ross Douglas Lawrence Julie Y. Lee Kirk A. Lee Susan Grimshaw Levesque Peter N. Lewis Donna Lightfoot Marjorie and Roy Linden Peter B. Loebel George A. Mackie Laurie L. Marsan Ross McKean and Mark G. Merryfield

Margaret and Wallace McCain Charles Pachter Alexander C. Pathy Robert (Bud) Patrick Terry Pratt M. Erik Quackenbush Roger Riendeau Diane P. Rogers Pat and Pekka Sinervo Peter Slemon Paul Grant Stanwood Ann and Ross Stuart Frank and Joanne Turner Tom Watt David George Whitehead Marni and Roland Wieshofer Joan Winearls Mary P. Winsor John Timothy Wixted 24 Anonymous Donors

This list recognizes donors who have made gifts-in-kind of $5,000 or more between May 1, 2016, and April 30, 2017.

Philip Anisman and Libby Hague Hugh and Elizabeth Anson-Cartwright Bruno and Jacqueline Apollonio Melvin Robert Appell Daniel Bailey Norman R. Ball and Philippa Campsie William Barker Deborah Barnett C. W. D. Birchall Naomi Black Peter Blayney Paul Bouissac Graham S. Bradshaw Robert C. Brandeis Walter and Danuta Buczynski Alan Bulman David Cameron Sheila D. Campbell Christine Castle Maria Cerezo Kenneth and Alayne Christie George Elliott Clarke

Eleanor Cook Afua Cooper Dave and Dale Cox Adam Crabtree Robert and Violet Crone Terence G. Crooks Andy Curran D. Aleck Dadson Frances Dafoe Marcel Danesi Brian Dedora Alberto and Caroline Di Giovanni Andrew Donato Nisha Dubey Konrad Eisenbichler Allan and Susan Fenwick Ben Fickling Donna Francisco Sydney G. Frankfort Albert D. and Nancy Friedberg J. H. Galloway Gayle Garlock Edward Gilmore Alastair G. and Victoria A. Grant

Phyllis Grosskurth Chester and Camilla Gryski Ian Hacking Dan Hagler Mary C. Ham Mary Harlan Frank Harmantas Maureen Scott Harris Edwin F. Hawken George F. Hawken Cristie Healey Jeffrey S. Herold Lawrence A. Hill F. David Hoeniger Richard and Donna Holbrook Derek and Margaret Holman Pauline L. Hoskin Douglas S. Hutchinson Gabrielle Israelievitch Heather Jackson Geoffrey James John Jasavala Lisa Jeffrey Eleanor Johnston William Johnston Simone Jones

HOW DO WE PROTECT THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE? Knowledge is as fragile as it is valuable. Archives can be lost, destroyed, or buried in an avalanche of data.

University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) is a world-class organization, not only for how it preserves its vast holdings, but also for its nimble response to massive digital change.

From collecting and digitizing rare works to organizing an exponential growth in information, UTL both safeguards the world’s knowledge and puts it in the hands of those who seek it, when and where they need it.

To support the Library, please contact Megan Campbell at 416-978-7644 or visit www.library.utoronto.ca/support

winter 2018 79

Hanna Kassis E. M. Kavaler Virginia Kelly Ingeborg Khan Susan Klayman and Family John Kloppenborg Linda Kooluris Dobbs Paul Kowarsky Linda A. Kricorissian Eva Kushner Arlene Lampert Anne and Ian Lancashire Simon Langlois Andrew J. Lesk V. Lobodowsky Katharine A. M. Lochnan Sally MacDonald Paul Robert Magocsi Patricia Maguire Terry S. Maley Alberto Manguel Dave Mason Sheila Mavor Moore James and Sylvia McGovern Joe Mendelson John and Myrna Metcalf Roger Miller Michael and Jane Millgate David Mirvish Shahrzad Mojab David and Julie Moos Carl Morey Kathryn P. Morgan Albert Moritz Karen Mulhallen Anne Murray Elena Nasato Diane H. Nelsen Peter W. Nesselroth Waller Newell Phillip Nimmons Mark and Janine Nusbaum, and Family Philip M. Oldfield Midi Onodera A. H. Harry Oussoren Kathy Page

Maria Elisabeth Pereboom Mary Kathryn Petkovich Graham Petrie Ruth Podeswa Neville G. Poy Tony Priolo Olga L. Pugliese Bernard M. Rasch John H. Reibetanz Julie Rekai Rickerd Judith Robertson Diana Robinson Rosanne T. Rocchi Yvonne Rosenberg William P. Rosenfeld Abraham Rotstein Julian Samuel Thomas T. Schweitzer Graham A. D. Scott Richard Scott Kenneth J. Sherman Theodore Y. Shimizu B E. Sinyard David W. Smith Donald Smith Sam Solecki Peter H. Solomon David Solway John D. Stanley and Helmut Reichenbacher Craig Stephenson Allan J. Stratton Kerry Stratton Orest Subtelny Rosemary Sullivan Stephen Sword Andrew M. Szende Ian Thornley Paul R. Till Giles R. Tomkins Earle and Iris Toppings Denton Tovell Rhea Tregebov Catherine Ukas George Walker F. Michael and D. Virginia Walsh Andrew M. Watson

Patrick Watson Michael Wayne Jule Webb Jarrett Welsh Monique and Christopher Wernham Mary F. Williamson Sybil Williamson Margaret Wilson Nora R. Wilson P M. Wilson Yvonne Wilson Dave Woolacott Moses Znaimer — Blue Source Canada ULC Canuck Sports Stuff (Toronto) Inc. Carbon Credit Solutions Inc. CCM Hockey Clement Virgo Productions Inc. Coca-Cola Ltd. Coop Carbone Duke of York Pub Flimshow Inc. Forum Research Inc. Gray Taylor Law Historica Canada Honeywell Industry Provincial Offset Group (IPOG) IPSOS Reid King Heating and Air Conditioning Kwik Goal Pizza Pizza Limited PwC RME Capital Corporation Sharp Electronics of Canada Ltd. Speedo Canada Ltd and Warnaco of Canada Sun-Rype Products Ltd. Wilson Sports Equipment Canada Inc. 17 Anonymous Donors

Fraser and Jennifer Code

A Prize to Encourage PhD Dreams Now that he is retired, Fraser Code, a professor of physics at U of T Mississauga between 1971 and 2003, wanted to leave a legacy – for graduate students, who play a critical role in advancing research. “To get a PhD prize is still a bit unusual in our community,” he says. “I thought, ‘Maybe this helps them open a door to a post-doc or to land a job.’” He and his wife, speech-language pathologist Jennifer Code, established the Fraser Code PhD Thesis Award.

“Grad school is such a grind and it’s critical to have something to keep you going,” says Jennifer. “We want this award to encourage students to follow their dreams.” Adds Fraser: “With a little imagination, you can open a door for other people to walk through.”

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CORPORATE MATCHING DONORS

We would like to acknowledge the generosity of corporations who matched charitable contributions made by their employees, directors and retirees between May 1, 2016, and April 30, 2017. To find out if your company is a matching gift partner, please call 416-978-2177 or visit our website at boundless.utoronto.ca/ways-to-give/matching-gifts.

Alliance Data Matching Gift Program Apple Matching Gifts Program Bank of America Bell Canada - Employee Giving Program BNY Mellon The Boeing Company Burgundy Asset Management Ltd. CVC Capital Partners D. E. Shaw & Company

Dow Chemical Company Foundation Ernst & Young Matching Gifts Program for Higher Education FM Global Foundation Google Matching Gifts Program Hydro One IBM Canada Ltd. KPMG Foundation Land O’Lakes Foundation Potash Corp.

Pratt & Whitney Canada Repsol Oil & Gas Canada Inc. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP Suncor Energy Foundation SYSCO Corporation TELUS Cares Thomson Reuters Corporation TransCanada Corporation 2 Anonymous Donors

PRESIDENTS’ CIRCLE Through their commitment and annual giving at the leadership level, Presidents’ Circle members help the university educate deserving students, attract and retain great faculty, and build innovative faculties and programs. Our thanks to Presidents’ Circle members for their foresight, leadership and generosity. For more information about making a leadership gift to U of T or to view our member listing, please visit giving.utoronto.ca/PC or call 416-978-3810.

IN HONOUR AND IN MEMORY The university is grateful to the many donors who choose, each year, to honour members of our community through gifts to U of T. In recognition of these tributes we have posted a comprehensive list on our website at boundless.utoronto.ca/donors.

WE WELCOME YOUR QUESTIONS We are grateful for the continued support of all our generous donors. We endeavour to make our lists as accurate as possible. For more information, or if you have questions about U of T’s donor listing, please contact Christine Concannon at 416-946-5915 or christine.concannon@utoronto.ca.

PHOTO: BLAKE ELIGH

All About Alumni

“ We want to create massive partipatory art that anyone can enjoy” Kevin Bracken (BA 2009 UC)

p. 85

Eileen de Villa

The City Is Her Patient Eileen de Villa targets opioids and homelessness as Toronto’s new medical officer of health ON A TUESDAY, late in the fall, Toronto’s newly appointed

medical officer of health, Eileen de Villa, shared some good news and bad news about the city, speaking in her characteristically calm, precise manner.

De Villa (MHSc 1994, MD 1998) noted that a program that integrates new immigrants into the city’s social fabric had won an international award. “It provides training to Arabic-­ speaking immigrants in food handling,” says de Villa, who is also an adjunct professor at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “These skills could translate into job opportunities

PHOTO: RYAN WALKER

while helping these newcomers to the country find a set of friends.”

The bad news was that, according to a count conducted by her staff, 70 homeless people died in Toronto in the first three quarters of 2017, at a median age of 48. When she delivered this news at a Board of Health meeting, many members expressed deep concern at the numbers. De Villa explained the methods of garnering the statistics – and what they meant and didn’t mean in terms of public-health impact.

Gathering data like this is a core part of de Villa’s newly assumed responsibilities. Hers is a big job, running Canada’s largest municipal health organization, with its budget of about $245 million and staff of 1,800. She always needs to be shifting focus between diverse programs – from influenza vaccines to restaurant inspections to smoking regulations.

De Villa is the daughter of doctors who left the Philippines in 1975 after Ferdinand Marcos seized power – her mother is a cardiologist, her late father was an obstetrician and

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All About Alumni

Ellen Tang in front of the St. John’s Ward exhibit in downtown Toronto

In the Spotlight, Yet Invisible Alumna Ellen Tang helps immigrants feel less alone by recalling other newcomers’ stories LOOKING OUT OVER the huge, barren construction site for Toronto’s new courthouse on a late-October day, Ellen Tang (MSW 2017) describes the rich past of this tract of land northwest of City Hall. From the mid-19th to mid-20th century, it was home to St. John’s Ward, one of Toronto’s earliest immigrant settlements.

“During the excavation, they found artifacts from the Ward properties,” says Tang. Shoes, toys and dishes were among

gynecologist – and medical issues were often discussed around the dinner table. But where her parents specialized in clinical areas of practice, she’s chosen to work on a broad canvas. “I loved the clinical part of my training, the work with individual patients,” she says, remembering how a senior doctor carefully taught her how to suture a blood-­ covered patient who’d fallen through a window when drunk.

“But now my patients are the 2.8 million residents of the city.”

Perhaps the most charged file de Villa inherited when she moved from the Peel Region’s health department is Toronto’s opioid problem. She talks about a mix of programs that she feels can help: ones for supervised injection sites, the first of which recently opened; for getting naloxone kits into the right hands (naloxone can be used to counteract overdoses);

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thousands of items that turned up, remnants from the neighbourhood that was originally home to refugees from the Irish Potato Famine, African-Americans who fled slavery, and Russian and Eastern European exiles. Images of artifacts and the stories and photos of former Ward residents appear along the construction fence – an exhibit curated by the Toronto Ward Museum, which Tang helped found. The museum, whose founding partners include U of T Scarborough, aims to revive the history of the Ward through exhibits (online and offline), events and more.

Every newcomer’s experience is unique – but hearing about those experiences can help immigrants feel less alone in their struggles, says Tang, whose family immigrated to Toronto from Hong Kong when she was 10, because of the uncertainty surrounding the colony’s handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997. “When we arrived here my dad didn’t come right away, so we were separated from him for a while.

I felt very uprooted,” she says. “It was this strange feeling of simultaneously being in the spotlight – because I was the new kid and different – but also invisible – because the language barrier made it difficult to express myself, and no one really knew me. It wasn’t until I was older that I started to ask questions about identity, and become curious about my roots and how other immigrants navigated being part of two worlds.”

Tang is now a social worker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s New Beginnings Clinic for refugees experiencing mental health challenges. She says she feels a responsibility to use her education and privilege to improve other immigrants’ experiences. “I’m doing that directly in my job now, but I’m still always interested in how telling stories – like the Ward Museum does – can inform a bigger conversation about ways to make life better for newcomers.”

– MEGAN EASTON

and for addiction treatment. But she’s also interested in the social messaging around the problem: “People need to know that using drugs when they’re alone is a risk factor, and people tend to be reluctant to engage in illegal activity in front of others,” she says.

In her soft-spoken, science-driven way, de Villa – a married mother of three – speaks of a shift she feels this society needs to make in its thinking around addictive substances. But, as with the gathering of data around homeless deaths, she sees the amassing of information – and understanding it – as the necessary precursor to a rethink of attitudes and policies.

“The social determinants have a direct impact on health, and you have to understand the extent of the problem, its roots, before you can begin to address it.” – ALEC SCOTT

PHOTO: LAURA PEDERSEN

All About Alumni

OVERHEARD

I want people who are blind, especially children, to know that there is a world of possibilities out there for them. You can still be an artist; you can be a musician . . . that realization can be life-changing for anyone struggling with vision loss.

Stelth Ng (BMusPerf 2013), a violinist with the Grigori String Quartet in Toronto, quoted in UHN News, May 2017. Ng is blind in the right eye, but three U of T profs at the University Health Network have helped save the sight in his left eye.

The Grigori String Quartet is developing a music outreach program, which includes a concert series for the visually challenged.

PHOTO: JIM RYCE

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All About Alumni

Millennials will go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, according to the New York Times

Maureen Judge

The Struggle Is Real Filmmaker Maureen Judge’s latest project captures stories of millennials venturing out on their own FILMMAKER MAUREEN JUDGE is all about capturing the journeys

that change people. It’s the perfect obsession for someone who found her own niche through trial and error. Judge (BA 1975 Innis) has made film and TV documentaries exploring everything from moms and daughters planning a wedding (Unveiled) to adult children who return home to live (In My

Parents’ Basement). Her latest, My Millennial Life, follows several 20-somethings struggling with launching a career and moving away from home. The film, which won a 2017 Canadian Screen Award, is presented wholly through the voices of the young protagonists. One of its subjects, Meron, has interned at MTV and is determined to become a broadcast journalist; she works as a chambermaid and has applied to 200 jobs hoping for her break. James, meanwhile, relies on loans from his parents while he develops his tech startup, Skywatch, which has already won the NASA Space Apps Challenge. “It’s fascinating to watch people come of age,” says Judge, who teaches film at Sheridan College. “It’s a transformative time.”

Judge’s own transformation began at U of T, where she started a degree in biology, but switched to philosophy halfway through. “I took a course in intellectual history, and loved it,” she says. “And I started to change.” After graduating, she spent a year in France, then, wanting to broaden her experience, earned an MA in cinema studies at New York University.

(Innis College only offered one film course then.) “The process of critical thinking and research, which I engaged in while studying philosophy at U of T, has been an important foundation for me as a filmmaker,” she says.

Her next project (to be released in 2019), Girls on the Bus, explores how female high schoolers are coping with their own pressures in, as Judge puts it, “a male-centric society. We’re always talking about pay differentials and the glass ceiling in the context of working women,” she says, “so I thought it would be exciting to explore these issues with girls poised to go into university.”

For each film she makes, Judge interviews up to 100 people.

“I listen,” she says, “and try to follow their stream of thought as opposed to making their ideas conform to my point of view. I want to make sure that what I am including in a documentary is not only resonant, but is real – because it’s their voices we’re hearing in the film.” – JANET ROWE

FILMS TO FILL YOUR QUEUE

Maureen Judge’s perfect Friday evening binge watch

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Éric Rohmer is one of my favourite filmmakers, and The Green Ray [1986], which is a love story, is a drama shot like a doc. It’s very beautiful, and it has a lovely sense of humour.

Richard Linklater’s trilogy – Before Sunrise [1995], Before Sunset [2004] and Before Midnight [2013] – is a very naturalistic drama. It’s heartfelt, funny and sometimes painful.

French filmmaker Agnès Varda has made brilliant narrative and documentary films for more than 50 years and is still at it.

I saw her latest, Faces Places, at TIFF.

PHOTO: RAFY © MAKIN’ MOVIES INC; BOTTOM, BFI.ORG.UK, IMDB.COM

All About Alumni

Kevin Bracken once organized a 500-person game of Capture the Flag on St. George Campus

MY DEFINING MOMENT

The Registrar Who Championed Me A U of T staff member helped Cheryl Perera manage her schoolwork while she fought for children’s rights

CHERYL PERERA (BA 2010 TRINITY)

IN MY FIRST YEAR AT U OF T, I founded OneChild – a non-profit organization that empowers young people to take action against child sex slavery. At 19, I didn’t know what it took to develop a non-profit, but I learned the ropes as I went along.

As the organization grew, it demanded more of my free time.

It was a very busy, stressful period. I considered taking a break from U of T to prioritize the development of OneChild.

Bruce Bowden, Trinity College’s registrar at the time, supported me to continue as a student while also growing OneChild. He advocated for me to have extra time to complete essays or write tests. He also wrote a recommendation letter for my entry into graduate school, and another such letter that helped me land my current fellowship at Care, an international development and humanitarian relief agency. I am now based out of its Washington office, where I work on efforts to end child marriage and gender-based violence.

Bruce enabled me to manage my undergraduate career and develop as a social entrepreneur. By sticking with my education, I gained the theoretical knowledge to build my non-profit, and to pursue other youth advocate roles at organizations such as the UN. To have someone at U of T as a champion was so helpful. – AS TOLD TO SHARON ASCHAIEK

Enter the Dragon

Why build a fire-breathing dragon bus? To go to Burning Man, of course!

Earlier this year, Kevin Bracken (BA 2009 UC), his wife, artist Marie Poliak, and friend Matt Von Wilde led efforts to build a fire-breathing dragon bus – a 19-foot-tall, 30-foot-long vehicle featuring a concert stage with amplified sound, as well as an animatronic jaw that opens and closes before shooting bursts of flames.

Why? To drive to Burning Man – an annual gathering in Nevada, which has a tradition of participants creating incredible art on wheels.

The bus has travelled to other events throughout North America, and Bracken has big plans for “Heavy Meta” (named after the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal) in the new year – from making its head pivot and its wings flap, to adding LED lighting that will increase the dragon’s visibility at night.

Volunteers constructed Heavy Meta in a shop in downtown Toronto – welding, cutting sheet metal and doing carpentry to help bring the concept to life. Bracken has challenged Torontonians to make nine more art cars that will live in the city, and several people have already answered the call. “We want it to be a Toronto art tradition, to create massive participatory art that anyone can enjoy,” says Bracken, whose brainchild Newmindspace started International Pillow Fight Day in 2005, which is now celebrated in 150 cities worldwide. – NADIA SIU VAN

PHOTO: TOP, COURTESY OF CHERYL PERERA; BOTTOM, DED PIXEL OF DED AGENCY

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All About Alumni

FIRST PERSON

Failing Is Part of Innovating How an early defeat helped U of T alum Tom Jenkins and his company, OpenText, succeed In 1998, OpenText was in the business of Internet search when a small startup called Google came along. Below, Jenkins – at the time the company’s CEO – writes about how OpenText’s failure against Google allowed the company to “pivot” and become one of the world’s largest software and cloud companies.

OPENTEXT ORIGINALLY SET OUT to be the primary search engine

of the Internet and it failed. From a Canadian point of view that’s very important, because part of the dilemma we have in Canadian innovation, invention and competition is that we shy away from failure. If somebody fails, we avoid looking that person in the eye. It’s a stigma.

OpenText’s stock price collapsed from $20 to $2 in less than six months. It was a very public failure. At the time, articles about the collapse of our business model and the abandonment of our search engine were appearing in various newspapers – not unlike the articles that have been published about the decline of BlackBerry, Nortel and Valeant.

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My friends in Waterloo, Ontario, my family, and other people I know in Canada lost large amounts of money on OpenText stock. When you take the garbage out to the end of your driveway, and realize that many of the homes you see belong to people who lost a good chunk of their money because of your failure, it’s very personal and very painful.

What came out of that failure?

OpenText turned to business-to-business applications, which was a less competitive market but no less lucrative than the public-facing business of search engines we moved out of. OpenText was far more profitable in the long run. However, if we had not failed with our first strategy, re-­evaluated and pivoted when we did, we never would have realized this success.

This is, I hope, the single most important learning: no matter what happens, you must stick it out, adapt, evaluate and pivot with confidence because, on your 131st try, it’s going to work.

Successful entrepreneurs are actually serial failures.

Thomas Edison is perhaps the greatest serial failure in the modern era – but we don’t think of him that way. We think of him as a successful entrepreneur and as a successful inventor. In fact, he failed time after time. He used his failures as opportunities to learn what didn’t work.

Failures are part of the journey toward success. As Edison and so many other innovators have proven, to fail is not the worst thing that can happen. But Canadians are myopic about it. Canadian companies such as Nortel and Research in Motion have had very public collapses. So have many others. The reality is that failure is going on all the time, and it is part of the innovation process.

At OpenText, we were fortunate to change direction in the nick of time. OpenText was able to take some of its resources, some of its money, and the technologies that it had built, repurpose them to a different market and a different application, and succeed. Our failure was only temporary, since the pivot proved to be the right decision. That would not become apparent, though, until many years later. OpenText began to grow in its new business and went on to be the market leader in designing and building software for corporate intranets and the cloud. Today, OpenText is one of the largest software and cloud companies in the world and never left its home in Waterloo. Today its headquarters for more than 12,000 people is located just a few steps away from where its first Internet search product, OpenText Index, was created in 1995.

Tom Jenkins (MASc 1985) is chair of the board of the OpenText Corporation and chair of the National Research Council. This article is adapted from Canadian Failures: Stories of Building Success (Dundurn Press, 2017).

ILLUSTRATION: MATT CHASE, PHOTO: COURTESY OF DUNDURN PRESS

All About Alumni

Acta Victoriana has published the works of Lester Pearson, Northrop Frye – and Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee, who collaborated under the pseudonym “Shakesbeat Latweed”

Conan Tobias

60 SECONDS WITH

Conan Tobias Taddle Creek’s editor-in-chief shares the back story of a uniquely Canadian magazine Conan Tobias (BA 1994) is the man behind Taddle Creek – the eclectic literary mag that publishes a mix of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and art. The mag is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Kerry Clare talks to Tobias – founder, editor-in-chief, publisher and art director – about Taddle Creek’s humble beginnings, his nitpicky love of fact-checking and his enduring passion for comics.

Taddle Creek started out with a Toronto focus, but has expanded to cover all of Canada and beyond. I was surprised to learn that you aren’t originally from Toronto . . . Well, most people aren’t from Toronto. I’m from Saint John, New Brunswick, and moved here in 1991 to go to U of T. I worked at the Varsity for three years. I also worked on the literary journal Acta Victoriana at Vic, which was actually what inspired Taddle Creek. Taddle Creek began as small as it possibly could, an annual magazine for a small Toronto neighbourhood – the Annex – so there was nowhere to go but up. I started at a time when it was still possible to get a lot of advertising, so that helped a lot, and then grants came along, and the Internet and social media made it easier to reach people.

It grew naturally, with a lot of hard work.

What’s been the key to keeping Taddle Creek going for 20 years?

I enjoy doing it and so it’s gone on this long because I want to keep doing it. When you’re a small magazine, there’s no money and it’s hard to keep it going. I do almost everything on it. There are other people who work on it, but no staff per se. If I had to pay people to do even half of what I do, we wouldn’t be in business. It’s my enjoyment of it and my desire to keep doing it.

At U of T you were an English major, but Taddle Creek has such a strong visual aesthetic. Do you have an art background as well? When I started at my college paper, the only position open was art director, and I later became art director of the Varsity. I’d worked on a paper in high school during the early days of desktop publishing, so I could fake it and I learned quickly. At Taddle Creek, I design the magazine – I’m not a professional art director by any means, but it’s something I enjoy. I talk to a lot of cartoonists and artists for Taddle Creek articles. I read comic books as a kid – and I still do. Artists can be interesting people, good to talk to and they have great back stories.

Two of your passions are proper grammar and factual accuracy.

In fact, you’re the author and editor of The Taddle Creek Guidebook to Fact-Checking Fiction. What is the experience of being an adherer to factual accuracy in 2017? There’s certainly a lot of sloppiness and “fake news” going on, but at the same time sane people are more interested in and energized about factual accuracy. When you see the uptick in subscriptions to the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Atlantic, I think it shows that people are interested in good, strong accurate journalism again. So while I don’t like seeing fake stuff, I do think that many people are caring more. I’m hoping that will win the day.

WINTER 2018 87

Time Capsule

Tub time for baby: Nurses teach U of T students how to care for a newborn

BRINGING UP BABY

1959 U of T nursing students learn the intricacies of infant care

88 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

In 1959, U of T lecturer Ruth Farnden (centre, without cap) instructs nursing students in the Mount Sinai Hospital maternity ward on how to bathe a newborn. The students – called Bluebirds because of their blue dresses and starched white aprons – were six of 30 enrolled in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program.

Ruth had been just 24 when Nettie Fidler, the director of U of T’s School of Nursing, phoned to ask her to teach at the school. “The Dickens I know why she chose me,” says Ruth (BSc Nursing 1957, BA 1959 Woodsworth, MHSc 1986) modestly. Since graduating, Ruth had practiced with the Victorian Order of Nurses, visiting new mothers and their babies. Enrolment at the School of Nursing had doubled in the previous five years, making the director somewhat desperate for teachers. “It was all hands to the pump,” recalls Ruth.

On her first day as a classroom lecturer, Ruth froze when she came face to face with the Bluebirds. But eventually she was in the delivery room, teaching them the progress of labour and how to assist with deliveries.

She also taught them how to suction amniotic fluid from the newborn’s mouth and nose and how to sterilize surgical instruments for episiotomies, which were common then. Often absent from the delivery room was the father, who was seldom allowed to even hold his baby until leaving the hospital, usually four to seven days postpartum.

“It was commonly accepted that beer was good for getting lactation started,” recalls Ruth, now 82. Then she hesitates, as if wondering if she should go on.

“OK, so beer was offered, but it was kept out of sight.”

– SUSAN PEDWELL

PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES, 2010-40-8MS

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VOLUME 45 NO. 2 MAGAZINE.UTORONTO.CA

Mentor a Student!

It’s not easy making your way in the world.

When you become an alumni mentor, your advice and insight help U of T students explore career choices, develop life skills and become better equipped for life after graduation. Consider joining the thousands of U of T alumni who have become mentors – and who have shared their time, knowledge and experience with students in more than 75 programs across the university.

To find out more, contact your faculty or college, or visit: alumni.utoronto.ca/ volunteer/mentor-a-student